Toward understanding and modeling of impurity gettering in silicon
- Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States)
Gettering of harmful impurities away from the device active regions has already become an integral part of manufacturing integrated circuits (IC) using Czochralski (CZ) Si wafers, and is experiencing an increasing importance in Si solar cell fabrications for improving the cell efficiency. Gettering consists of (1) the creation of suitable gettering sites; and (2) the gettering processes of contaminants. Requirements for successful gettering differ between the IC and solar cell cases, because ICs are monolithic devices situated at the Si wafer surfaces while solar cells are bulk devices, and because the Si substrate materials used are different. For IC fabrications, the method used is that of intrinsic or internal gettering (IG) which utilizes oxygen precipitates and their associated defects in the CZ Si wafer bulk as gettering sites. Because of the bulk nature of IG sites, the scheme cannot be used also for solar cells. Only some kind of extrinsic or external gettering (EG) schemes with gettering sites located at the wafer surface regions can be used for solar cells. The gettering of the harmful contaminants, usually metals, to the gettering region involves the metal dissolution from precipitated state, the metal atom diffusion to and the stabilization at the gettering sites. A mathematical model of the gettering process is presented.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab., Golden, CO (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 415138
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/SP--413-8250; CONF-9508143--Extd.Absts.; ON: DE95009278
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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