Injection deep level transient spectroscopy: An improved method for measuring capture rates of hot carriers in semiconductors

An improved method for measuring the cross sections for carrier trapping at defects in semiconductors is described. This method, a variation of deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) used with bipolar transistors, is applied to hot carrier trapping at vacancy-oxygen, carbon-oxygen, and three charge states of divacancy centers (V₂) in n- and p-type silicon. Unlike standard DLTS, we fill traps by injecting carriers into the depletion region of a bipolar transistor diode using a pulse of forward bias current applied to the adjacent diode. We show that this technique is capable of accurately measuring a wide range of capture cross sections at varying electric fields due to the control of the carrier density it provides. Because this technique can be applied to a variety of carrier energy distributions, it should be valuable in modeling the effect of radiation-induced generation-recombination currents in bipolar devices