Athermal germanium migration in strained silicon layers during junction formation with solid-phase epitaxial regrowth

The formation of a thin strained Si layer on top of a strain-relaxed SiGe buffer is a recent approach to improve the drive current of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor devices by inducing strain within the transistor channel. At the same time, advanced process technologies require junction formation processes with minimal diffusion and very high dopant activation. Solid-phase epitaxial regrowth is a low temperature process based on preamorphization and subsequent regrowth leading to highly activated and shallow junctions. In this letter, we investigate the stability of the thin strained Si layer, during solid-phase epitaxial regrowth process by monitoring the Ge redistribution/strain after the preamorphization step (without any anneal) and after the thermal regrowth process.