It was pointed out that the role of interstitial clusters in dopant diffusion was fairly well understood, but the understanding of vacancy clusters was relatively poor; due mainly to the inadequacy of current techniques for profiling and counting vacancy defects. However, 2 important new steps in understanding vacancy-type defects had been made. The first was the demonstration that high-energy ion implantation could be used as a
vacancy implanter to introduce vacancies (V) in Si that were separated from the interstitials (I) by relying on spatial separation of the Frenkel pairs due to the average forward momentum of the recoils. The second was the development of 2 techniques, Au labeling and cross-sectional X-ray micro-beam diffuse scattering, which permitted quantitative measurements to be made of vacancy-type defect clusters and their depth distributions. The Au labelling technique was highlighted here and the vacancy implanter in conjunction with Au labelling was used to study the evolution of excess vacancy defects (Vex) that were created by the high-energy ion implantation of Si+ in Si(100) as a function of fluence and temperature. It was shown that a precise injection of Vex was possible by controlling implanted fluence. It was also shown that the Vex clusters formed by the high-energy ion implantation were extremely stable and their annihilation was governed by interstitial injection rather than vacancy emission in the temperature range of 800 to 900C.

Quantitative Evolution of Vacancy-Type Defects in High-Energy Ion-Implanted Si - Au Labeling and the Vacancy Implanter. R.Kalyanaraman, T.E.Haynes, M.Yoon, B.C.Larson, D.C.Jacobson, H.J.Gossmann, C.S.Rafferty: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, 2001, 175-177, 182-6