Injection-dependent Minority Carrier Lifetime in Epitaxial Silicon Layers by Time-resolved Photoluminescence

Time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) is used to evaluate the injection-dependent effective minority carrier lifetime of high resistivity epitaxial silicon layers grown on highly doped CZ-Si substrates. Effective lifetimes ranging from 10 μs to 200 μs are estimated for excess carrier densities between 1x1017 cm-3 and 2x1016 cm-3. Standard models are used to separate the contribution from the different recombination mechanisms. The influence of the epitaxial layer and substrate parameters on the minority carrier effective lifetime measurement is discussed.