Cluster ripening and transient enhanced diffusion in silicon

Transient enhanced diffusion of boron marker layers following silicon ion i mplantation shows a complex behavior as a function of annealing temperature and time. In the initial phase of ripening, small clusters with low bindin g energy give rise to an extremely large interstitial supersaturation (simi lar to 10(6)-10(7) at 600 degrees C). As the clusters ripen into {113} defe cts the supersaturation drops to a level which remains almost constant with time until the {113} defects have dissolved. By inverse modeling of the Os twald ripening process, values are extracted for several basic physical par ameters: the energy barrier for boron-interstitial association, the dissoci ation energy E-diss of the migrating boron-interstitial species, and the in terstitial self-diffusion product. The data are consistent with recent ab i nitio predictions that the migrating boron species is a boron-interstitial pair. Analysis of the detailed time evolution of TED allows us to extract E -diss for silicon clusters and {113} defects as a function of defect size, n. We find strong oscillations on E-diss in the size range 2 < n < 10. For larger clusters E-diss rapidly converges to a near-constant value of about 3.7 eV, characteristic of {113} defects. The results have been initially im plemented in the atomistic Monte Carlo simulator DADOS. (C) 1999 Elsevier S cience Ltd. All rights reserved.