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Minority Carrier Lifetime Measurement in Germanium on Silicon Heterostructures for Optoelectronic Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2011

Josephine J. Sheng
Affiliation:
[email protected], Sandia National Laboratories and University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, P.O.Box 5800, MS 1077, Albuquerque, NM, 87185-1077, United States
Malcolm S. Carroll
Affiliation:
[email protected], United States
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Abstract

Demand for low cost and high density near infrared (NIR) detection has motivated the development and use of germanium on silicon (Ge/Si) heterostructures to extend the optoelectronic application of Si technology. Ge/Si structures are currently being considered for NIR p/n detectors that can be integrated with Si CMOS [1]. Various research demonstrations of integrated Ge/Si diodes with CMOS have been made including using sputtered poly-Ge to form Ge/Si photodiodes after the CMOS transistors were complete. Poly-crystalline germanium (poly-Ge) may be formed by various methods including the use of plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. In this work, the formation of poly-Ge/Si heterostructures by inductively coupled plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (ICP-CVD) is examined as an alternative method to integrate poly-Ge into a CMOS process flow. In this work, 25 nm poly-Ge on Si heterostructures are formed by either recrystallization of ICP-CVD hydrogenated amorphous germanium (α-Ge:H) or direct deposition of ICP-CVD poly-Ge. A rapid measure of the suitability for detectors of the different poly-Ge films is the minority carrier recombination lifetime, which can affect dark current, quantum efficiency and overall detector detectivity. Recombination lifetimes were measured, therefore, in α-Ge:H that was recrystallized using rapid thermal annealing between 400 – 1050 °C in nitrogen ambient. Lifetimes were measured using a non-contact inductively coupled photo-conductance setup and an effective surface recombination velocity is subsequently extracted for each Ge/Si heterostructure that describes the integrated recombination in the Ge layer and at the Ge/Si interface, which separates the Ge contribution from recombination in the bulk silicon and at the silicon surface. The effective recombination velocities for the 25 nm Ge layers are found to be ∼103−104 cm/s.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2006

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References

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