Characteristics of metal-induced crystallization/dopant activation and its application to junction diodes on single-crystalline silicon

In this work, we investigated the effect of p- and n-type dopant atoms (boron and phosphorus) on two- and one-step Ni metal-induced crystallization (MIC) of amorphous Si in the aspects of crystallization rate and crystal quality with XRD, SIMS and sheet resistance measurements. The two- and one-step MIC techniques were first applied to fabricate p ⁺/n and n ⁺/p junction diodes on single-crystalline Si substrates below 500°C and we compared those with the diodes formed by the solid phase crystallization technique at 750°C, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the low-temperature MIC junction diodes for source/drain of p- and n-channel single-crystalline Si TFTs.