A model was presented which described the movement and interaction of native point defects and impurities in this material. Semi-quantitative simulations of typical processing problems were performed for cases where only Hg interstitials, Hg vacancies, and cation impurities were important. Results on the formation of n-on-p junctions, by the Hg annealing of high vacancy content material, indicated that junction depths could be a sensitive function of the n-type dopant concentration. When low vacancy content n-type material was annealed in a Hg-poor ambient, simulation results confirmed the difficulty of forming a high-quality well-defined p-on-n junction. The difficulty arose because of the generation of Hg vacancy/interstitial pairs throughout the bulk during most of the process. It was demonstrated that impurity gettering could be described by the present model. All of the simulation results were consistent with available experimental data.

J.L.Meléndez, C.R.Helms: Journal of Electronic Materials, 1993, 22[8], 999-1004