Early Stages of Oxygen Precipitation in Silicon

It was fOlllld as long ago as 1954 that heating oxygen rich silicon to around 450°C produced electrical active defects - the so called thermal donors. The inference was that the donors were created by some defect produced by the aggregation of oxygen. Since then, there has been an enor­ mous amount of work carried out to elucidate the detailed mechanism by which they, and other defects, are generated. This task has been made all the more relevant as silicon is one of the most important tech...