STUDY OF THE MECHANISM OF CW LASER ANNEALING OF ARSENIC-IMPLANTED SILICON

In this paper we report on experiments designed to study the mechanism by which a continuous scanning laser anneals implantation-amorphized silicon. A stationary Ar laser beam was used to irradiate an As-implanted Si sample at constant power for different anneal times. The size of the annealed spot was found to increase with exposure time. The annealing spot size was also calculated for each exposure time by assuming the laser annealing mechanism to be a simple solid-phase epitaxial regrowth. Comparison of experiment and theory suggests that, at least for amorphous layers, the cw laser simply heats the substrate to a temperature where solid-phase epitaxial regrowth can occur quickly.