Data for Increasing minority carrier lifetime in as-grown multicrystalline silicon by low temperature internal gettering

Substantial improvements are found in bottom wafers, for which annealing at 400 °C for 35 h increases lifetime from 5.5 μs to 38.7 μs. The lifetime of top wafers is improved from 12.1 μs to 23.8 μs under the same conditions. A correlation between interstitial iron concentration reduction and lifetime improvement is found in these cases.

Surprisingly, although the interstitial iron concentration exceeds the expected solubility values, low temperature annealing seems to result in an initial increase in interstitial iron concentration, and any subsequent decay is a complex process driven not only by diffusion of interstitial iron.<br><br>Figure 3 (a): effective lifetimes, Figure 3 (b): interstitial iron concentrations, Figure 5: dislocation density frequency distributions, Figure 6: effective lifetimes, Figure 7: interstitial iron concentrations, Figure 10: lifetime correlation with interstitial iron