High Quality Si-on-SiO(2) films by large dose oxygen implantation and lamp annealing.

Ion beam synthesis of a buried SiO(2) layer is an attractive silicon-on-insulator technology for high speed CMOS circuits and radiation hardened devices. We demonstrate here a new annealing procedure at 1405C that produces silicon films of excellent quality, essentially free of oxygen precipitates and with sharp interfaces between the Si and the SiO(2). Buried oxide layers have been formed in Si (100) wafers by implanting 400keV molecular oxygen at 500C to a dose of 1.8 x 10(18) cm(-2). Annealing was performed by radiative heating of the back side of each sample to the melt temperature of silicon, T(M)=1412C, so that the buried oxide structure was at 1405C. The temperature control relies entirely on the change in optical properties of silicon upon melting. This ensures, without any external feedbacks, that the surface exposed to the photon flux will remain at T(M).