Depth profiles of Al impurities implanted in Si wafers determined by means of the high-resolution grazing emission X-ray fluorescence technique

The synchrotron radiation based high-resolution grazing emission X-ray fluorescence (GEXRF) technique was used to extract the distribution of Al ions implanted with a dose of 10(16) atoms/cm(2) in Si wafers with energies ranging between 1 and 100 keV. The depth distributions of the implanted ions were deduced from the measured angular profiles of the Al-K alpha X-ray fluorescence line with nanometer-scale precision. The experimental results were compared to theoretical predictions of the depth distributions resulting from ion implantation. A good agreement between experiment and theory was found which proved that the presented high-resolution grazing emission X-ray fluorescence technique is well suited to perform depth profiling measurements of impurities located within the extinction depth, provided the overall shape of the distribution can be assumed a priori. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.