Maximum Active Concentration of Ion-Implanted Phosphorus During Solid-Phase Epitaxial Recrystallization

In this paper, we showed that the maximum active P concentration of approximately \hbox{2} \times \hbox{10}^{20}\ \hbox{cm}^{-3} exists during solid-phase epitaxial recrystallization (SPER). This maximum active concentration is close to the reported values for other active impurity concentrations during SPER. We introduced the concept of an isolated impurity that has no neighbor impurities with a certain lattice range. Assuming that impurities interact with three or four neighbor impurities, we can explain the activation phenomenon during SPER. According to our model, the isolated P concentration N_{\rm iso} has a maximum value of approximately \hbox{2} \times \hbox{10}^{20}\ \hbox{cm}^{-3} at a total impurity concentration of approximately \hbox{10}^{21}\ \hbox{cm}^{-3} , and it decreases with a further increase in total impurity concentration. Deactivation occurs after the completion of SPER with increasing annealing time, and the active impurity concentration decreases with time but is always higher than the maximum diffusion concentration N_{{\rm Diff}\max} . We also observed that N_{{\rm Diff}\max} is independent of the annealing time despite nonthermal activation in the high-concentration region. We evaluated the dependence of N_{{\rm Diff}\max} on annealing temperatures. We think that this N_{{\rm Diff}\max} can be regarded as the electrical solid solubility N_{\rm Esol} that the