The use of the carrier illumination technique to measure non-destructively the lateral diffusion of implanted dopants after annealing was described. Experiments intended to validate the feasibility of this method involved test structures with a constant line-width of 300nm and varying undoped spaces of 100 to 5000nm. The test patterns were implanted with a p-type dopant and annealed in a 3 x 3 matrix. For each implant condition, the measured lateral diffusion was found to increase with annealing temperature, as expected. More interestingly, the lateral diffusion was not observed to be related to the vertical diffusion by a fixed proportionality factor, as was usually assumed. The ratio of lateral to vertical diffusion varied with annealing temperature, with a trend that depended upon the implant condition.

Carrier Illumination Measurement of Dopant Lateral Diffusion. E.Budiarto, M.Segovia, P.Borden, S.Felch: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, 2005, 237[1-2], 324-9