Evolution of palladium related defects in silicon

The perturbed angular correlation technique is very well suited to characterize the structural, dynamic and electronic properties of impurity or impurity-defect complexes on an atomic scale. Using radioisotope probe ¹⁰⁰Pd/¹⁰⁰Rh, such measurements have been performed to study the palladium related defects in silicon as a function of dopant concentration (10¹⁵ to 10²⁰ dopants cm^-3), dopant type (P, As, Sb and B) and isochronal annealing. The palladiumvacancy, Pd-V^-, and palladium-boron, Pd-B, defect complexes have been observed during isochronal annealing in highly doped n- and p-type type silicon respectively. The fractional population of the Pd-vacancy defect pair as a function of P concentration revealed a dominance of ionized vacancies, an effect of Fermi-level dependence. The absence of Pd-P pairing in n-Si suggests that Pd would never be gettered via phosphorus diffusion gettering mechanism.