Comparing Spreading Resistance Profiling and C-V characterisation to identify defects in silicon sensors

The quality and functionality of a silicon sensor strongly depends on the effective doping concentration of the active silicon bulk. The creation of additional defects, by certain steps in the production or through irradiation in a particle beam, can heavily influence its performance. Several methods exist to characterise the bulk material for a silicon sensor. C-V characterisation is a widely implemented, non-destructive method to extract the depth profile of Neff. A technique which is rarely used at laboratories developing silicon sensors is Spreading Resistance Profiling (SRP) which directly measures the resistivity of the silicon. We will show, that a comparison of measurements from these two methods can yield important information on the defect concentration in the bulk of the silicon. To demonstrate the technique, we investigated a sensor material where the active region was reduced using a deep diffusion process which is assumed to create additional defects in the bulk.