| AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Plasma Science and Technology Division | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session PS-TuP |
| Session: | Plasma Science and Technology Division Poster Session |
| Presenter: | Isao Sakata, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan |
| Authors: | S. Nunomura, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan I. Sakata, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan K. Matsubara, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
In semiconductor devices such as transistors, memory, solar cells, and light emitting devices, the electronic defects strongly impact on the device performance and reliability. These defects are often generated during the device fabrication, in which plasma processing technology is widely used for deposition, etching and implantation. To remove the defects in the devices, a annealing treatment is usually performed. However, some defects remain in the devices, and they deteriorate the device performance. The reduction of these residual defects is required, and thus it is important to understand the annihilation kinetics during the annealing period.
We studied the annihilation kinetics of electronic defects in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). The electronic defects were generated by photon irradiation and plasma treatment. The annihilation of defects during the annealing is observed by in-situ photocurrent measurement [1-2]. An increase in the photocurrent reflects the annihilation of the defects. From the time evolution of the increasing photocurrent, we obtained the characteristic time, τ, and an Arrhenius plot is prepared to determine the activation energy.
From the experiments, we find the following [3]. (i) The time evolution of the photocurrent exhibits the stretched exponential behavior, indicating the dispersive nature of a-Si:H. (ii) An Arrhenius plot shows an exponential decay of 1/τ vs 1/T, verifying defect annihilation due to the thermal activation. Here, T is the annealing temperature. (iii) The activation energy is different, depending on the origin of defect generation. It is smaller for the defects generated by plasma treatments, compared with that of the defects induced by the photon irradiation. (iv) The exponential prefactor is different between the UV and VUV photon-induced defects. The details of the experimental setup, results and discussion will be given in the presentation.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 18K03603 and 15K04717) and NEDO.
[1] S. Nunomura, I. Sakata, and M. Kondo, Appl. Phys. Express 6, 126201 (2013). [2] S. Nunomura and I. Sakata, AIP Advances 4, 097110 (2014). [3] S. Nunomura et al., submitted.