Reduction of phosphorus diffusion in bulk germanium via argon/phosphorus co-implantation and RTA annealing

Germanium has received increased research interest for use in next-generation CMOS technology as its high carrier mobilities allow for enhanced device performance without further device scaling. Fabrication of high-performance NMOS Ge devices is hindered by high diffusivity and low activation of n-type implanted dopants. While the high solid solubility of P in Ge makes it an ideal dopant, its diffusion mechanism is poorly understood and results in heavy tradeoffs between implanted dopant diffusion and electrical activation. In this study, we demonstrate the suppression of in-diffusion of implanted P via a co-implantation with Ar. Diffusivity of implanted P species and their activation is investigated over a wide range of annealing temperatures and times. P diffusion was explored by secondary-ion-mass-spectrometry and the diffusivity of P was extracted by solving the 2D diffusion equation using the Crank-Nicolson method, and the dopant electrical activation was extracted from the Hall effect measurements. The co-implantation of P with Ar entirely suppresses P in-diffusion up to annealing temperatures as high as 700 C-degrees but at the cost of its reduced electrical activation. Extracted diffusivity reveals a highly correlated exponential relationship with annealing. P activation energy was extracted from Arrhenius behavior. A 450 C-degrees/10 min annealing of P implant shows negligible in-diffusion of P with the activation as high as 70%. RTA processing of the Ar/P co-implanted sample at 750 C-degrees for 1 min results in a negligible P in-diffusion and an electrical activation of 20%.