Effect of light germanium doping on thermal donors in Czochralski silicon wafers

Abstract In this paper, the effect of light Germanium (Ge-) doping on thermal donors (TDs) in Czochralski silicon (CZ-Si) has been investigated by four-point probe and low-temperatures Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer. After 650 °C, 30 min annealing to eliminate the grown-in TDs, conventional CZ-Si and germanium-doped CZ-Si (GCZ-Si) samples were further subjected to isothermal annealing at about 450 °C to generate TDs. It was found that Ge-doping suppressed the formation of TDs. Moreover, the low temperature FTIR absorption spectra of the TDs in GCZ-Si were found to agree quite well with that of TDs in CZ-Si, which was not the case for the heavily Ge-doped silicon. Therefore, it is considered that the light Ge-doping suppresses the formation of TDs but does not affect the microscopic structure of TDs.