Temperature effects on annealing crucial deep-level defects in neutron-irradiated silicon: multiscale modeling

Studying temperature effects on defect behaviors during thermal annealing is significant for understanding the performance degradation and recovery of semiconductor devices under irradiation. We systematically studied temperature effects on annealing crucial deep-level defects in neutron-irradiated silicon, by developing a multiscale modeling approach. The temperature-dependent concentrations and electron occupation ratios of crucial defects of divacancies (V 2 ) and tri-vacancies (V 3 ) were given for dynamic and post-irradiation annealing. Besides the common direct dissociation, we found a new approach to eliminating V 2 and V 3 by their recombination with interstitials dissociated from interstitial-relative defects at relatively low temperatures. To effectively eliminate V 2 and V 3 by post-irradiation annealing, we further determined the activation energies of 1.98[Formula: see text]eV and 1.71[Formula: see text]eV for V 2 and V 3 , respectively. We also found that, within the operation temperature range of devices, the higher the temperature, the better the radiation resistance. It is thus recommended that the optimal temperature of post-irradiation annealing for device performance recovery is near 600[Formula: see text]K.