Ion-implant simulations: The effect of defect spatial correlation on damage accumulation

A predictive damage accumulation model, which takes into account different interdependent implant parameters, has been developed. The model assumes that the recrystallization rate of damage structures known as amorphous pockets (AP) is a function of its effective size, regardless of their spatial configuration. In the model, APs are three-dimensional agglomerates of interstitials (I) and vacancies (V), whose initial coordinates are generated by a binary collision approximation (BCA) code. This work addresses the importance of the spatial correlation of I's and V's in modeling damage accumulation and amorphization, by comparing simulations, whereby the initial coordinates of I and V are generated by BCA or randomly generated from the concentration distribution of an input damage profile. Low temperature implantations were simulated to avoid dynamic annealing in order to compare the initial damage morphology. For the same damage level, simulations by BCA resulted in ion mass dependent APs’ sizes, with lighter implant ions generating smaller APs’ sizes, implying more dilute damage compared with heavier ions. However, the ion mass dependent APs’ size effect was lost by loading the same damage profile and randomly positioning the I's and V's. Consequently, the damage morphology, as well as the annealing behaviour obtained by reading I, V damage profiles is substantially different from those obtained using the much more realistic cascades generated by BCA.