Recent years have seen great advances in our understanding and modeling of the coupled diffusion of dopants and defects in silicon during integrated circuit fabrication processes. However, the ever-progressing shrinkage of device dimensions and tolerances leads to new problems and a need for even better models. In this review, we address some of the advances in the understanding of defect-mediated diffusion, focusing on the equations and parameters appropriate for modeling of dopant diffusion in submicron structures.

In recent years, ion implantation has become one of the key techniques in semiconductor fabrication. The annealing of the damage produced during implantation is, however, not fully understood. Ion implantation at high temperatures allows the time-resolved study of implantation-enhanced diffusion. During the process, point defects are generated by the ion implantation and consumed by recombination in the bulk as well as by diffusion to the surface and recombination there. With increasing temperatures, the recombination of point defects, which are acting as diffusion vehicles, results in reduced effective diffusion. Profiles processed above 900 show marked uphill diffusion at the surface caused by large gradients of the point defect concentrations. This uphill diffusion affirms the generally accepted pair diffusion theories. Since the point defects are in steady state even after process times which are short compared to the total process time, we are able to give a qualitative analysis of the dose dependence of the diffusion. By extensive numerical simulations, we could estimate the product of bulk recombination rate and equilibrium concentrations of self-interstitials and vacancies as well as the interface recombination velocity for the self-interstitials. The results obtained are in qualitative agreement with previous work of others. The results demonstrate, in fact, clearly the advantages of the method presented. But due to experimental problems concerning the temperature measurement, which have not been fully resolved up to now, the results have to be considered as crude estimates.