Breaking the doping limit in silicon by deep impurities

Abstract

N-type doping in Si by shallow impurities, such as P, As and Sb, exhibits an intrinsic limit due to the Fermi-level pinning via defect complexes at high doping concentrations. Here we demonstrate that doping Si with the chalcogen Te by non-equilibrium processing, a deep double donor, can exceed this limit and yield higher electron concentrations. In contrast to shallow impurities, both the interstitial Te fraction decreases with increasing doping concentration and substitutional Te dimers become the dominant configuration as effective donors, leading to a non-saturating carrier concentration as well as to an insulator-to-metal transition. First-principle calculations reveal that the Te dimers possess the lowest formation energy and donate two electrons per dimer to the conduction band. These results provide novel insight into physics of deep impurities and lead to a possible solution for the ultra-high electron concentration needed in today's Si-based nanoelectronics.

26 pages, including the suppl information

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Critical behavior of the insulator-to-metal transition in Te-hyperdoped Si
• Microsecond non-melt UV laser annealing for future 3D-stacked CMOS
• Active Sites of Te-hyperdoped Silicon by Hard X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy