Theoretical study of vacancy supersaturation during silicon crystal growth and nitrogen-doping effects

Abstract

We performed thermodynamical simulations of the vacancy supersaturation during silicon crystal growth and investigated nitrogen-doping effects on the suppression of void formation and the enhancement of oxygen precipitates. Although the mechanism with the N 2V complex has been proposed to explain the suppression, we found that it cannot reproduce the suppression even with nitrogen density as high as 10 20 cm –3. On the other hand, the mechanism with the N 2V 2 complex can reproduce the suppression with about 10 15 cm –3 of nitrogen, which is consistent with the experiments. It also explains the enhancement of oxygen precipitates. Therefore, the N 2V 2 complex plays the dominant role in the vacancy aggregation process.