It was fOlllld as long ago as 1954 that heating oxygen rich silicon to around 450°C produced electrical active defects - the so called thermal donors. The inference was that the donors were created by some defect produced by the aggregation of oxygen. Since then, there has been an enor mous amount of work carried out to elucidate the detailed mechanism by which they, and other defects, are generated. This task has been made all the more relevant as silicon is one of the most important technological ma terials in everyday use and oxygen is its most common impurity. However, even after forty years, the details of the processes by which the donors and other defects are generated are still obscure. The difficulty of the problem is made more apparent when it is realised that there is only one oxygen atom in about ten thousand silicon atoms and so it is difficult to devise experiments to 'see' what happens during the early stages of oxygen precipitation when complexes of two, three or four 0xygen atoms are formed. However, new important new findings have emerged from experiments such as the careful monitoring of the changes in the infra red lattice absorption spectra over long durations, the observation of the growth of new bands which are correlated with electronic infra-red data, and high resolution ENDOR studies. In addition, progress has been made in the improved control of samples containing oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen.

Inhalt
Oxygen-related defects in silicon: Studies using stress-induced alignment.- The initial stages of oxygen aggregation in silicon: Dimers, hydrogen and selfinterstitials.- Infrared studies of the early stages of oxygen clustering in silicon.- Magnetic resonance investigations of thermal donors in silicon.- Magnetic resonance on heat treatment centres in silicon.- Effect of hydrogen on oxygen-related defect reactions in silicon at elevated temperatures.- Passivation of thermal donors by atomic hydrogen.- Oxygen-carbon, oxygen-nitrogen and oxygen-dimer defects in silicon.- The role of trivalent oxygen in electrically active complexes.- Hydrogen-oxygen interactions in silicon.- Oxygen diffusion in silicon: The influence of hydrogen.- Generation of thermal donors, nitrogen-oxygen complexes and hydrogen-oxygen complexes in silicon.- The electronic structure of the oxygen donor in silicon from piezospectroscopy.- Low temperature diffusion and agglomeration of oxygen in silicon.- Roles of structural defects and contaminants in oxygen precipitation in silicon.- Various forms of isolated oxygen in semiconductors.- Oxygen-related luminescence centres created in Czochralski silicon.- The nitrogen-pair oxygen defect in silicon.- Thermal double donors in silicon: A new insight into the problem.- Interaction of positrons with vacancy-oxygen complexes and oxygen clusters in silicon.- Formation of thermal donors in Czochralski grown silicon under hydrostatic pressure up to lGPa.- Complexes of oxygen and group II impurities in silicon.- Copper and oxygen precipitation during thermal oxidation of silicon: A TEM and EBIC study.- Computer simulated distribution of defects formed during Cz-Si crystal growth.- A small angle neutron scattering study of oxygen precipitation in silicon.- Atomic composition, structure and vibrational excitation of substitutional carbon-oxygen complexes in silicon.- Influence of isovalent doping on the processes of thermal donors formation in silicon.- Some properties of oxygen-related radiation induced defects in silicon and germanium.- Defect profiling of oxygen-related defects using a slow positron beam.- Shallow N-0 donors in silicon.- The C-Si-0-Si(?C) four-member ring and the Si-G15 centre.- Kinetics of oxygen loss and thermal donor formation in silicon: The rapid diffusion of oxygen clusters.- Molecular dynamics study of oxygen defects in silicon.- A kinetic model for precipitation of oxygen in silicon.- Oxygen gettering and thermal donor formation at post-implantation annealing of silicon.- Carbon-hydrogen-oxygen related centre responsible for the I-line luminescence system.- Luminescence investigations of the interaction of oxygen with dislocations in Cz Si.- An isochronal annealing study of the kinetics of VO and VO2 defects in neutron irradiated Si.- Uniform stress effect on nucleation of oxygen precipitates in Czochralski grown silicon.- On the impact of grown-in silicon oxide precipitate nuclei on silicon gate oxide integrity.- Low temperature annealing studies of the divacancy in p-type silicon.- Anomalous distribution of oxygen precipitates in a silicon wafer after annealing.- Oxygen precipitation in MCZ silicon: Behaviour and dependence on the origin of raw material and growth conditions.