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Implications of Grain Boundaries on Quasi-steady-state Photoconductance Measurements in Multicrystalline and Cast-mono Silicon by Aref Samadi; Alison Ciesla; Catherine Chan; Mattias Juhl is a Engineering article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Implications of Grain Boundaries on Quasi-steady-state Photoconductance Measurements in Multicrystalline and Cast-mono Silicon about?

Quasi-steady-state photoconductance is commonly used for measuring the effective lifetime of excess carriers in silicon wafers. A known artifact, unrelated to the sample's lifetime in eddy current based photoconductance measurements, is a strong increase in lifetime at low carrier densities. It is commonly observed in multicrystalline and cast-mono crystalline silicon. This artifact is often attributed to bulk defects changing their charge state and is referred to as trapping. In this work, we investigate an alternative interpretation for materials with crystallographic defects. In this interpretation, the trapping-like behavior is caused by local changes in the Fermi energy level at grain boundaries (compared to the bulk crystal), along with the substantial movement of the majority carriers' quasi Fermi energy level during the photoconductance measurement. Using cast-mono wafers, we observe a variation in trapping signals and dark conductance that correlates with grain boundaries. We show that the trapping-like behavior in these regions can be explained by a change in electrostatic potential barrier heights at different illumination intensities and in the dark, impacting eddy curr

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Author

Aref Samadi; Alison Ciesla; Catherine Chan; Mattias Juhl

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Published

2022

Language

EN

Field

Engineering (Physical Sciences)