Electrical activation of ion implanted Si in amorphous and crystalline In0.53Ga0.47As

The effect of pre-amorphization on the electrical activation of Si implants into In0.53Ga0.47As is investigated. Electrical measurements show that Si implants into pre-amorphized and crystalline In0.53Ga0.47As yield similar levels of activation (1.0 × 1019 cm−3 in the pre-amorphized case and 9.0 × 1018cm−3 in the crystalline case) upon rapid thermal annealing for 5 s at 750 °C despite having very different types of resulting damage in the electrically active layers. The subsequent microstructural characterization by TEM indicates that the highly defective regrown layers in the pre-amorphized substrate leads to poor mobility in the active layers, which result in lower sheet resistances. The results suggest that solid phase epitaxy (SPE) in compound semiconductors can lead to some improved activation at lower temperatures and does not prevent substitutional activation of amphoteric dopants upon post SPE annealing.