Groups III and V impurity solubilities in silicon due to laser, flash, and solid-phase-epitaxial-regrowth anneals

In this work the authors studied impurity solubilities of groups III and V elements in silicon resulting from laser anneal, flash anneal, and solid-phase-epitaxial regrowth. Rutherford backscattering channeling analysis was used to determine substitutional impurity depth profiles generated from the difference between the random and aligned spectra. Despite the large difference in peak temperatures and times, the anneals produce similar results with maximum solubilities beating the maximum equilibrium values by one to two orders of magnitude depending on the impurity. The correlation between the metastable solubility and the equilibrium distribution coefficient allows a prediction of values for other impurities not extracted experimentally.