Annihilation of Stacking Faults in Silicon by Impurity Diffusion

Abstract

The stacking faults grown into silicon during thermal oxidation were shrunk by high temperature heat‐treatment in a nitrogen atmosphere. The activation energy for fault shrinkage was 5.2 eV, and nearly equal to that of silicon self‐diffusion, 5.13 eV. The shrinkage phenomenon is due to the removal of silicon atoms, which form the stacking faults of extrinsic type, by diffusion via vacancies. Therefore the shrinkage rate depends on the vacancy concentration in silicon. The high concentration diffusion of boron, phosphorus, and arsenic in silicon generates the excess vacancies induced by donor doping, or by the stress due to solute lattice contraction of the impurity. The shrinkage of stacking faults by these excess vacancies was investigated. The faults shrank rapidly and disappeared for a short time in comparison with simple heat‐treatment. The annihilation of stacking faults in silicon was also influenced by the coulomb interaction or the complex formation between the negatively charged vacancy and impurity.