Statistical analysis of recombination properties of the boron-oxygen defect in p-type Czochralski silicon

Abstract

This paper presents the application of lifetime spectroscopy to the study of carrier-induced degradation ascribed to the boron-oxygen (BO) defect. Specifically, a large data set of p-type silicon samples is used to investigate two important aspects of carrier lifetime analysis: ① the methods used to extract the recombination lifetime associated with the defect and ② the underlying assumption that carrier injection does not affect lifetime components unrelated to the defect. The results demonstrate that the capture cross section ratio associated with the donor level of the BO defect (k₁) vary widely depending on the specific method used to extract the defect-specific recombination lifetime. For the data set studied here, it was also found that illumination used to form the defect caused minor, but statistically significant changes in the surface passivation used. This violation of the fundamental assumption could be accounted for by applying appropriate curve fitting methods, resulting in an improved estimate of k₁ (11.90±0.45) for the fully formed BO defect when modeled using the donor level alone. Illumination also appeared to cause a minor, apparently injection-independent change in lifetime that could not be attributed to the donor level of the BO defect alone and is likely related to the acceptor level of the BO defect. While specific to the BO defect, this study has implications for the use of lifetime spectroscopy to study other carrier induced defects. Finally, we demonstrate the use of a unit-less regression goodness-of-fit metric for lifetime data that is easy to interpret and accounts for repeatability error.

Keywords

Czochralski silicon / boron-oxygen defect / injection dependent lifetime spectroscopy / goodness-of-fit / repeatability error

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP). The views expressed herein are not necessarily the views of the Australian Government, and the Australian Government does not accept responsibility for any information or advice contained herein. The authors would also like to thank the commercial partners of the ARENA 1-060 project, and the UK Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) for their funding support for this work through the A.F. Harvey Engineering Prize.

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