Thermal evolution of defects produced by implantation of H, D and He in Silicon

Despite decades of study, voids in silicon produced by implantation of H or He followed by annealing continue to be a topic of interest. There are two key applications: gettering of heavy metal impurities, and “ion cutting” used in silicon-on-insulator fabrication. Positron annihilation is one of the few techniques that can probe the vacancies and vacancy clusters that are the precursors to void formation. Data from recent studies will be …