An investigation was made of implantation-induced swelling under a wide range of implantation dose and annealing conditions. A square-root dependence between the implantation dose and amount of swelling was observed, and was related to the presence of vacancy clusters in the amorphous layer. The annealing behaviour of the swelling also supported this conclusion. A simple theoretical model which incorporated vacancy-mediated amorphization and swelling was shown to agree fairly well with the experimental data over the entire range of ion doses. A density reduction of about 2.9% was estimated for the amorphous phase, with respect to the crystalline phase. This magnitude was higher than the values reported in the literature.

Ion Implantation-Induced Swelling and Amorphization of Silicon: Role of Vacancies. P.K.Giri, E.Rimini, V.Raineri, G.Franzo: Proceedings of the SPIE, 2000, 3975, 371-4