Electron Beam Induced Current (EBIC) method for understanding radiation damage in Si and GaN

Understanding and mitigating the adverse effects of radiation on semiconductor devices remains an active area of research motivated by increased use of electronics in high radiation environments. When a device is exposed to energetic particles, a variety of structural defects are created and then redistributed through diffusion, cluster formation, and recombination. How the defects are distributed in the device can profoundly affect its electrical characteristics, yet methods which can reliably image this distribution are lacking. In the first part of my presentation, I will describe how EBIC in the scanning electron microscope can spatially identify defects produced by a 300 keV He+ beam in model n-MOSFET devices. By analyzing the EBIC signal through the bulk pn-junction and through the gate, radiation damage in the bulk Si or the SiO2 gate can be identified, respectively. Correlation of the defect distribution maps with device electrical characteristics analyzed using Silavaco softwa