High activation reaching supersaturation achieved by short-duration flash lamp annealing

We are developing a new flash lamp annealing (FLA) system featuring flash lamps with short duration and high output power for all CMOS technology nodes including advanced devices. With this system, we can realize lower thermal budgets and higher peak temperatures (jump temperature). Our conventional FLA tool has a wide range of annealing conditions, with annealing times from 0.8 to 100 ms. The duration of the FLA conditions of the system we are developing can be extended to deep sub-millisecond levels, making it complementary to our conventional tool. In this report, we present initial data from a new prototype system. The data clearly demonstrate that higher activation can be achieved. Notably, supersaturated activation of 4.6×10
²⁰
cm
^-3
can be achieved with only slight diffusion of 5.8 nm in a p+/n Si junction. In addition, Hall effect measurements revealed higher carrier concentrations of up to 10
²⁰
cm
^-3
in polycrystalline Si (poly-Si). These results show that the new system has the potential for forming highly activated junctions with minimal diffusion in Si and poly-Si and can contribute to the fabrication of high performance devices.