Annealing Behavior of Reactive Ion Etching Induced Deep Levels

The damage related levels, created by reactive ion etching, have been investigated using deep level transient spectroscopy. The devices used were: Au/n-Si Schottky diodes and p⁺-n diodes. The dominant deep level, in the surface region exposed during RIE, is an electron trap. The defect annealing behavior reveals the disappearance of one type of trap and appearance of new, complex traps. In most of the cases the concentration of the damage centers decreases with higher temperature annealing. The nature of the electron trap and the annealing behavior strongly suggests that they are due to lattice damage created by reactive ion etching.