A thermal annealing of ion-implanted silicon

The experimental work reported in this paper has confirmed that Rapid Thermal Annealing in the presence of optical excitation has a significant athermal component of annealing. It is suggested that the origin of athermal component annealing is related to the energy localization in the vicinity of deep level defects which may be in metastable state after optical excitation. The fact that these kind of states cannot be achieved by thermal annealing may be the reason for differences between thermal annealing (in dark) and annealing in the presence of optical irradiation. It is demonstrated that athermal annealing can be use for typical annealing application such as S/D anneal of submicron devices. Sheet resistance, SIMS profile and bulk lifetime were measured. Parametric test data are presented for typical logic ASIC process.