Abstract
Rapid Thermal Annealing has been used to study the electrical activation of a range of donor and acceptor species in ion-implanted GaAs. By varying the time and temperature of the post implant anneal, it was found that the activation processes for most implants can be characterised in terms of two distinct regions. The first of these occurs at short annealing times, where the electrical activity is seen to follow a time-dependent behaviour. At longer annealing times, however, a time-independent saturation value is reached, this value being dependent on the annealing temperature. By analysing the data from Be, Mg, S and Se implants in GaAs, a comprehensive model has been evolved for the time and temperature dependence of the sheet electrical properties. Application of this model to each of the ions studied suggests that the activation processes may be dominated by the extent to which ions form impurity-vacancy complexes. An analysis of the time-dependent regime also shows that, at short annealing times, the mobile species is more likely to be the substrate atoms (or vacancies) rather than the implanted impurities. In the time-dependent region, the values of diffusion energy were found to be between 2.3 to 3.0 eV for all ions, these values corresponding to a diffusion of Ga or As vacancies (or atoms). In the saturation region, activation energies of 0.3 to 0.4 eV and 1.0 to 1.2 eV were obtained for the activation processes of interstitial or complexed impurities respectively.