Activation of shallow dopants in II–VI compounds

Abstract

The amphoteric native defect model is applied to the understanding of the variations in the dopant activation efficiency in II–VI compounds. It is shown that the location of the common energy reference, the Fermi level stabilization energy, relative to the band edges can be used to determine the doping induced reduction of the formation energy and the enhancement of the concentration of compensating native defects. The model is applied to the most extensively studied compound semiconductors as well as to ternary and quaternary alloys.