Anomalous diffusion of boron in silicon driven under the N/sub 2/O ambient

In this letter, p/sup +//n junctions formed by a solid source of a boron-doped layer under different ambient gases will be demonstrated. In this study, it was found that the obtained junction depth depends strongly on the ambient gas. Especially in the N/sub 2/O ambient, the diffusion of boron is enormously enhanced. The resulting junction depth can be as high as eight times of those junctions formed in N/sub 2/. Such phenomenon is much more profound than the well-known oxidation-enhanced diffusion (OED) effect of O/sub 2/. We call this new effect as the nitri-oxidation-enhanced diffusion (NOED) effect. As a consequence, it is proposed that the NOED effect is instrumental for low-cost fabrication of well structures in the CMOS technology.