The Role of Grown-In Defects in Silicon Minority Carrier Lifetime Degradation During Thermal Treatment in Epitaxial Growth Chambers

Severe silicon lifetime degradation was found after its high-temperature treatment in III-V material growth chambers for the fabrication of III-V/Si multijunction solar cells. Further improvement of the cell efficiency requires insights into the root cause of such lifetime degradation and how to protect the silicon lifetime accordingly. While the exact origins of such degradation remain largely unknown, most published work concluded that extrinsic impurities that diffuse into the silicon bulk during the thermal treatment are the sole reason. In this article, we show that while not necessarily present in every float-zone silicon wafer, grown-in defects that can be thermally activated is also a key mechanism behind the observed silicon lifetime degradation during anneal in our molecular beam epitaxy chamber. As such, annealing of the silicon wafer in the furnace at 1000 °C to annihilate the grown-in defects, together with the deposition of a SiNX diffusion barrier to prevent the extrinsic impurities from diffusing into the silicon bulk, are both required to preserve the silicon lifetime throughout the III-V material growth steps.