
Investigation on the Transformation of B-Defect in As-Grown Czochralski Silicon Crystal during Annealing Process
Author(s) -
Zhan Li,
Yun Liu,
Tao Wei,
Minghao Li,
Ziwen Wang,
Zhongying Xue,
Xing Wei
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
ecs journal of solid state science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.488
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 2162-8777
pISSN - 2162-8769
DOI - 10.1149/2162-8777/ac53f6
Subject(s) - materials science , ingot , crystallography , dislocation , silicon , crystallographic defect , annealing (glass) , void (composites) , oxygen , crystal (programming language) , composite material , metallurgy , chemistry , organic chemistry , alloy , computer science , programming language
When a silicon ingot is grown by the Czochralski method, different defects, such as A-defect (a dislocation loop or dislocation loops cluster), B-defect (widely accepted as an interstitial atoms cluster), COP (crystal originated particle, a void), and grown-in oxygen precipitates will emerge. Nowadays most crystal defects can be characterized directly. However, due to the extremely small size and stress, B-defects can only be indirectly characterized by the formation of oxygen precipitates. What’s more, it is unclear whether B-defects transform into oxygen precipitates directly or B-defects grow and transform into A-defects firstly and further facilitate oxygen precipitation via the dislocation pinning effect. In this work, after implementing an optimized anneal at 900 °C for 3 h and HCl vapor-phase etch at 900 °C for 2 min, nano-scale defects transformed from B-defects are efficiently detected by a surface particle counter. Scanning electron microscope and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy results prove that these nano-scale defects are all oxygen precipitates. This explicit result indicates that B-defects can induce the formation of oxygen precipitates directly rather than relying on the formation of A-defects, which would help to better understand the characteristic of B-defect in relatively low temperature and the transformation process between different defects in silicon ingot.