Investigation of the dose loss during annealing in nitrogen of shallow-implanted arsenic

Arsenic implanted into silicon at 2 keV to a dose of 1×10¹⁵ cm^-2 is annealed over a wide range of temperature (from 700 to 1100°C) and time (from spike to 240 sec) in a nitrogen ambient in order to investigate the various thermally-activated phenomena: Activation, Diffusion and Out-diffusion. X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), Sheet resistance (Rs) measurements and TCAD simulation have been used to determine the trade-off between activation and dose loss by out-diffusion. It is shown that above a threshold temperature, there is a dramatic increase in the dose loss. For the implant conditions we used, this threshold temperature is found to be about 950°C.