Photoluminescence imaging of silicon bricks

Photoluminescence imaging techniques have recently been extended to silicon bricks for early production quality control and electronic characterisation in photovoltaics and microelectronics. This contribution reviews the state of the art of this new method which is fundamentally based on spectral luminescence analyses. We present highly resolved bulk lifetime images that can be rapidly extracted from the side faces of directionally solidified or Czochralski grown silicon bricks. It is discussed how detailed physical modelling and experimental verification give good confidence of the best practice measurement errors. It is also demonstrated that bulk lifetime imaging can further be used for doping and interstitial iron concentration imaging. Additionally, we show that full spectrum measurements allow verification of the luminescence modelling and are, when fitted to the theory, another accurate method of extracting the absolute bulk lifetime.