Annealing Kinetics of the Interstitial Carbon–Dioxygen Complex in Silicon

The interstitial carbon‐interstitial dioxygen complex (C i O 2i ) has a deep state close to the mid bandgap of Si and can be an efficient recombination center. In this work, the annealing kinetics of C i O 2i in p‐type, boron doped, Czochralski grown (Cz) silicon are studied. Two sets of samples are irradiated at room temperature (RT) with 1.8 MeV protons to doses of 1 × 10 13  cm −2 (set A) and 5 × 10 13  cm −2 (set B). After irradiation, the samples of both sets are pre‐annealed at 400 °C for 30 h in order to anneal out the well‐known interstitial carbon‐interstitial oxygen (C i O i ) complex and to form the C i O 2i complex. The annealing of C i O i and formation of C i O 2i is monitored by deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) via observation of the corresponding electronic levels at 0.36 eV and 0.39 eV above the valence band edge ( E V ), respectively. The samples are then subjected to isothermal annealing treatments in the temperature range 450–550 °C. The annealing of C i O 2i follows a first order kinetics, exhibiting an activation energy of 2.55 eV, and a pre‐exponential factor in the range (2–30) × 10 12  s −1 . The kinetics and the deduced parameters suggest that C i O 2i anneals out by dissociation rather than diffusion mechanism.