Oxygen precipitation behavior in heavily arsenic doped silicon crystals

Our results show that even in heavily arsenic doped silicon the oxygen precipitation is a strong function of the initial oxygen concentration, similar to what has been observed for lightly doped silicon. In addition, a precipitation retardation effect is observed in the arsenic doped samples when the dopant concentration is higher than 1.7×1019 cm−3 compared to lightly doped samples with the same initial oxygen content and crystal thermal history. Finally, a long permanence time of the crystal in the temperature range between 450 °C and 750 °C enhances the oxygen precipitation, showing that this is an effective temperature range for oxygen precipitation nucleation in heavily arsenic doped silicon.