Enhancement of dopant solubility in compound semiconductors during crystal growth

Abstract

Doping of semiconductors is a process of intentionally incorporating impurity into the materials to adjust and optimize the electrical properties during the processing of semiconductors. The doping level has certain upper limit, which is usually corresponding to the solubility of the dopant in the host material under processing conditions. Sometimes, the maximum solubility level is still not high enough to provide the desired opto-electronic properties and a higher doping level is needed. Hence, enhancing the dopant level is one of the critical issues in the semiconductor industry, especially for those advanced devices made from compound semiconductors, including binary, ternary, as well as multi-component compounds. In this report, we designed a processing method, by simply varying a processing parameter during melt growth, to increase the doping level in the compound semiconductors well above the maximum values obtained under otherwise regular processing procedures and demonstrated it in the melt growth of Cl-doped PbTe.