Innovative Methods for Semiconductor Doping

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to present this Special Issue of the Journal Micro, entitled: "Innovative methods for semiconductor doping." Its objective is to provide up-to-date, relevant references on the advanced doping techniques for semiconductors currently under investigation by the scientific and industrial communities. The International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS™) has requested advanced concepts for higher performance and energy efficient devices. As far as scaling is concerned, new device architectures such as double or tri-gate and nanowires or nanosheets have been introduced. Fin field-effect transistors have already become mainstream, but the technology still requests other vertical gate-all-around architecture advancements. The challenges in pursuing these objectives are the inability to obtain conformality through the conventional doping methods, the surface defect effects, the dopant activation, and the losses due to the parasitic resistances. Many of these effects compromise the high-mobility benefits of the vertical structure, undermining these new approaches' technological relevance. In this perspective, new paradigms in alternative doping solutions have been developed, such as monolayer doping, laser annealing, plasma-based processes, to name a few. These new advances' maturity level is up to lab-scale device application, but still, many aspects need improvement and deeper studies for the very large-scale integration (VLSI). Another current interest in higher performance versus energy efficiency is related to silicon carbide doping, widely used in high power devices. Here, the open challenges for the in-situ and ex-situ cases are the high-temperature activation processes, incomplete dopant ionization, dopant profiling, ohmic contact formation, impurity lattice location, as well as lattice distortions. Many of the concepts listed so far refer to inorganic semiconductors and their alloys. A rising interesting field is doping in organic semiconductors. The doping concepts differ significantly for inorganic and organic semiconductors due to fundamental differences in, e.g., transport and electron-hole generation mechanisms. In organics, doping has been mostly excluded mainly for the uncontrollable diffusion. As a result, organic electronics currently suffer from low performance and manufacturing difficulties. Breakthroughs in doping organic semiconductors have, however, demonstrated that doping is key to enable high‐performance. The fundamentals in doping basics, mechanisms and techniques, the phenomena observed, and the doping role in the desired electrical characteristics are currently open issues. With the introduction of these approaches in organic and inorganic semiconductors, simulations from ab-initio to TCAD can help explore the new options by designing and assisting experiments.

This Special Issue will welcome high quality experimental and modeling studies on the above-mentioned developments in advanced semiconductor doping techniques. The list of key topics is reported in the following:

• Different Substrates (Si, SiC, Ge, SiGe, InGaAs, GaP, organic materials...)
• Doping Technologies and Processes: Ion Implantation, Plasma Doping, Molecular, Gas and Solid Doping.
• Annealing Technologies and Processes: Rapid Thermal Processing, Laser Annealing, Flash Annealing, SPE, Silicide, Contact and Dielectric Formation, Lattice Damage and Defect
• Device Applications: CMOS, Memory, Power (SiC, GaN), RF-SOI, Image Sensors, IoT Devices, Photovoltaics, III-V Devices
• Metrologies: Chemical, Physical and Electrical Characterization of 2D and 3D Structures
• Modeling and Simulations (from ab-initio to TCAD) of all of the above.

Dr. Rosaria A. Puglisi
Dr. Jost Adam
Dr. Ray Duffy
Guest Editors

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