Annealing neutron damaged silicon bipolar transistors: Relating gain degradation to specific lattice defects

Abstract

Isochronal anneal sequences have been carried out on pnp and npn transistors irradiated with fast neutrons at a variety of fluences. The evolution of base and collector currents was utilized to characterize the annealing behavior of defects in both the emitter-base depletion region and the neutral base. Various annealing biases, theoretical modeling, as well as previous deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) data, were used to assign the relative magnitude of each of the important defects to the total recombination current. We find that donor-vacancy pairs in the neutral n-type base of our pnp transistors are responsible for about 1/3 of the postdamage lifetime degradation, while the remaining recombination currents can be largely attributed to a cluster-related divacancylike defect which has no shallow state DLTS emission peak. This latter defect anneals gradually from 350 to 590 K. Generation/recombination currents in the base-emitter junctions in both types of devices were found to anneal in a similar, gradual fashion, suggesting that this same cluster-related intrinsic lattice defect is also responsible for the large, damage-induced base currents.