Electron holography study of voids in self-annealed implanted silicon

The characterization of defects produced during self-annealing implantation of P+ ions in silicon is of great interest for the realization of good quality pn junctions in silicon and to understand the peculiarity of beam-solid interactions occurring during implantation performed under the conditions of rather high current and power density. High-resolution electron holography is employed here to study the three-dimensional configuration of nanometre-size voids obtained by P+ ion bombardment of a silicon wafer. Reconstructed phase difference information has been used to obtain maps in which the phase distribution gives a qualitative topography of the cavity shape as well as quantitative measurements of the depth variations.