Abstract
The purpose of this work was to investigate the surface passivation of n-type float zone silicon substrates using a double layer composed of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride (SiN:H). The layers were deposited by using an Electron Cyclotron Resonance Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition (ECR-PECVD) reactor.
In this study, we report on the effect of deposition temperature and thickness of the a-Si:H layer on the surface passivation quality of silicon. The effect of SiN:H layer for coating the a-Si:H is reported as well. We recorded effective minority carrier lifetime values close to 1 ms for the best combination of temperature deposition and layer thickness for the a-Si:H film stacked with a SiN:H coating layer.
FTIR measurements were systematically carried out for the different layers deposited in order to quantify the hydrogen content and tentatively link these measurements with the passivation level obtained.
This work also shows that an improvement of the surface passivation quality occurs when a capping SiN:H layer is deposited on top of the a-Si:H layer that can be partly attributed to the annealing step occurring during the SiN:H layer deposition at 400 °C.
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The authors would like to thank the ANR project BIFASOL ANR-11-PRGE-004 for financial support.
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Schutz-Kuchly, T., Slaoui, A. Double layer a-Si:H/SiN:H deposited at low temperature for the passivation of N-type silicon. Appl. Phys. A 112, 863–867 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-013-7802-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-013-7802-4