About the project
Microscopic identification of defects responsible for the device performance is one of the mainstreams for many well-established methodologies clearly prioritizing in-situ observations providing unambiguous arguments. Concurrently, there is a significant progress reached in applications of various types of capacitance spectroscopy to reveal electrical characteristics of isolated electron states in semiconductors – so called carrier traps. However, assigning a particular defect to a particular carrier trap is always a challenge for capacitance spectroscopies and requires additional assumptions as well as ex-situ measurements. Within the MIDAS project, we are exploring the idea of depletion capacitance variations while the samples are in-situ illuminated with x-rays having energies below and above the K-shell absorption edges of impurities constituting the defects. In other words, the corresponding additional electron emission from K-shells is indeed “element sensitive” and can be used for connecting the electronic and structural properties of the defect. This novel methodology is to be developed and tested at the Swiss-Norwegian Beam Lines (SNBL) of the at European Synchrotron Radiation facility (ESRF) and our preliminary data for Fe in Si look promising (to be at the ICDS-2015). Upon the methodology is established, we plan to use it in order to reveal long-standing defects identification issues in semiconductors.
Financing
The MIDAS project is funded by the Research Council of Norway
Infrastructure
The relevant research infrastructure for MIDAS is located at MiNaLab