It is known that the interstitial iron concentration in silicon is reduced after annealing silicon wafers coated with plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposited (PECVD) silicon nitride films. The underlying mechanism for the significant iron reduction has remained unclear and is investigated in this work. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) depth profiling of iron is performed on annealed iron-contaminated single-crystalline silicon wafers passivated with PECVD silicon nitride films. SIMS measurements reveal a high concentration of iron uniformly distributed in the annealed silicon nitride films. This accumulation of iron in the silicon nitride film matches the interstitial iron loss in the silicon bulk. This finding conclusively shows that the interstitial iron is gettered by the silicon nitride films during annealing over a wide temperature range from 250 °C to 900 °C, via a segregation gettering effect. Further experimental evidence is presented to support this finding. Deep-level transient spectroscopy analysis shows that no new electrically active defects are formed in the silicon bulk after annealing iron-containing silicon with silicon nitride films, confirming that the interstitial iron loss is not due to a change in the chemical structure of iron related defects in the silicon bulk. In addition, once the annealed silicon nitride films are removed, subsequent high temperature processes do not result in any reappearance of iron. Finally, the experimentally measured iron decay kinetics are shown to agree with a model of iron diffusion to the surface gettering sites, indicating a diffusion-limited iron gettering process for temperatures below 700 °C. The gettering process is found to become reaction-limited at higher temperatures.

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In this paper, the precipitation kinetics of iron in multicrystalline silicon during moderate temperature annealing are systematically studied with respect to annealing time, temperature, iron super-saturation level, and different types and densities of precipitation sites. The quantitative analysis is based on examining the changes in the concentrations and distributions of interstitial iron in multicrystalline silicon wafers after annealing at 400–700 °C. This is achieved by using the photoluminescence imaging technique to produce high-resolution spatially resolved images of the interstitial iron concentrations. The concentrations of interstitial iron are found to decrease exponentially with the annealing time. Comparison of the precipitation time constants of wafers annealed at different temperatures and of different initial interstitial iron concentrations indicates that higher levels of iron super-saturation result in faster precipitation processes. The impact of iron super-saturation on the precipitation kinetics becomes increasingly important at low levels of super-saturation, while its impact saturates at very high levels of super-saturation (above 1000). Some grain boundaries are shown to act as effective precipitation sites for iron during annealing, and the reduction in the interstitial iron concentrations in the intra-grain regions is found to be mainly due to precipitation at dislocations. Some important differences between the iron precipitation behaviour at the grain boundaries and at the intra-grain dislocations are discussed. The effect of hydrogenation of the multicrystalline silicon wafers on the apparent iron precipitation rate is also presented and discussed.

We present experimental evidence for the impurity gettering effect of atomic layer deposited aluminium oxide (Al2O3) films on silicon wafers, during typical surface passivation activation at 425 °C. Iron was used as a model impurity in silicon to study the gettering effects. Dissolved iron concentrations were determined by carrier lifetime measurements, allowing the iron loss kinetics in silicon wafers with Al2O3 coatings to be monitored during annealing. The redistribution of iron to the surface layers and the sub-surface regions was examined by secondary ion mass spectrometry depth profiling. The results show that the atomic layer deposited Al2O3 films generate a strong gettering effect, removing 50% of the iron after 30 min at 425 °C for a 160-μm thick silicon wafer. The iron reduction process is largely diffusion-limited in the initial stages. The gettering effect is caused by the accumulation of iron at the Al2O3/Si interface.