Implantation damage and epitaxial regrowth of silicon studied by differential reflectometry

Differential reflectometry is an extremely fast, nondestructive, and highly sensitive optical technique which can be used to investigate the damage which is inflicted to materials, such as silicon, by ion implantation. In particular, the thickness of an amorphous layer can be determined within a few nanometers. It can be concluded from differential reflectograms whether an implanted wafer is crystalline, damaged crystalline, or amorphous, and whether or not an amorphous layers is submerged below a crystalline region. This paper describes the technique of differential reflectometry and summarizes results on ion-implanted silicon which have been published within the past decade.