Heavy-ion sources: The Star, or the Cinderella, of the ion-implantation firmament? (invited)

The Star, because of the invaluable contribution which the heavy-ion source has already made to the successful development of semiconductor implantati on. And the Star, too, because it is evident that the key characteristics o f such sources, which are now used on a quite routine industrial basis-thei r reliability, their ease of operation and, above all, their extraordinary versatility-have still not been fully exploited. This ensures that there is still scope, at least in the short term, for further optimization, which w ill go some way to meet the increasingly stringent industrial doping requir ements. The Cinderella, because of my belief that these heavy-ion sources h ave now contributed to the successful operation of ion implanters so well, and for so long, that their present level of performance is mistakenly take n for granted. The result has been a paucity of meaningful research and dev elopment. Despite this, in this article I aim to show that, like Cinderella , who was so neglected that her true merit was long overlooked, there is th e prospect too of achieving the significantly larger improvements in beam q uality which the semiconductor industry will eventually be seeking. (C) 200 0 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(00)57702-8].