Status and open problems in modeling of as-implanted damage in silicon

Implantation damage plays an important role in silicon device manufacturing since, e.g., it causes transient enhanced diffusion and influences the activation of dopants. Many studies have recently been performed of the evolution of implant damage and its interaction with dopant atoms during anneal. However, modeling of the as-implanted damage, needed as an input to these simulations, has largely been neglected. In this paper, we review the experimentally found dependencies of the implantation damage on implant parameters, give an overview of basic theoretical concepts, and discuss the status of atomistic modeling of the damage formation process. The basic atomistic approach consists of a loop over molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the collision cascades and kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations of the dynamic annealing between the cascades. Open problems with this approach are the coupling of MD and kMC simulations and, from a practical point of view, the large computation times required by the MD method. Recent efforts to replace MD by enhanced binary collision (BC) simulations are discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.