Categories: Chemistry, Material Science, Microfabrication

Semiconductor Substrates – Crystal Defects

Crystal defects play an important role in semiconductor fabrication. One type of defect is a Frenkel defect. Understanding such defects involves determining the vacancy concentration as given by Arrhenius function. I reviewed several videos to help me understand this equation:

Background Concepts

I took a detour to remind myself about activation energy, electron volts, and Boltzmann’s constant (all of which feature when studying Arrhenius function).

Line Defects

Another type of crystal defect is a line defect, e.g. edge dislocation. These videos contain additional information about edge dislocations.

Area Defects

A stacking fault is an extra plane of atoms. Some resources about stack faults:

Gettering is a process by which impurities and defects diffuse through the crystal (controlling where defects occur). This can be used to improve yield in semiconductor manufacturing as explained in this video:

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