Injection-dependent lifetime studies of copper precipitates in silicon

Copper precipitates have been deliberately formed in single-crystal silicon wafers in order to study their impact on carrier lifetimes. The injection dependence of the measured lifetimes of samples with different dopant type and resistivity reveals the presence of both shallow and deep levels associated with the precipitates, in support of previous DLTS studies. Although such precipitates are expected to produce a continuous range of interacting energy levels, a simple model using only one shallow and one deep Shockley-Read-Hall recombination center results in a consistent fit across all samples