Challenges and opportunities in atomistic dopant profiling using capacitance-voltage measurements

This article investigates the effects of discrete dopant location and concentration on the differential capacitance of nanoscale metallic probes situated on the surface of semiconductor materials. Using the formalism of doping sensitivity functions, it is shown that the differential capacitance of such systems is particularly sensitive to the exact location and concentration of dopant atoms, which can potentially lead to the development of new techniques for atomistic 3-D dopant profiling. Such techniques require solving the inverse problem, in which we compute the 3-D dopant profile from the output capacitance-voltage characteristics of the system. This problem is mathematically challenging, but can be solved in principle using the formalism of doping sensitivity functions. In the final part of the presentation we present a number of sample simulations and analyze the challenges of this approach.