Impurity Removing at Dislocations in Float Zone Silicon by Aluminium-Silicon Alloying

Abstract

ABSTRACTAluminium-silicon alloying is applied to dislocation-containing FZ silicon samples in order to verify if this external gettering technique is able to remove impurities trapped by these defects. Samples were scratched (front surface), bent and annealed at 750°C for 6h in order to create dislocation arrays. Standard samples and also nickel contaminated samples were investigated by light beam induced current (LBIC) mapping technique before and after alloying at 900°C for 4h with a 1 μm thick aluminium layer deposited on the backside. The LBIC technique detects the features of the dislocation array in agreement with X ray topographs. In the standard samples, the contrast is relatedto an inadvertent contamination of the samples and disappears after gettering. In the contaminated samples, dislocation contrast is higher, the aluminium treatment attenuates strongly the dislocations electrical activity but not so neatly as for the standard samples. This result is explained by the possible microprecipitation of nickel at dislocations.