Intrinsic Point Defects and Their Control in Silicon Crystal Growth and Wafer Processing

Silicon produced for the microelectronics industry is far and away the purest and most perfect crystalline material manufactured today. It is fabricated routinely and in very large volumes. Many of the advances in integrated-circuit (IC) manufacturing achieved in recent years would not have been possible without parallel advances in silicon-crystal quality and defect engineering. Transition-metal contamination is a case in point. Essentially all practical problems (minority carrier lifetime, metal precipitation, stacking faults, etc.) associated with metal contaminants have largely been solved through advances in crystal purity.