9732092 Donnelly The project seeks to investigate and develop a new annealing technique that is able to both repair damage to a crystal and electrically activate dopants in silicon without the use of thermal energy. The annealing is accomplished by focusing a high energy laser pulse onto a small spot on the surface of the sample. Experiments have shown that the entire sample is annealed, even in regions far from the laser focal spot. It is speculated that the laser launches a shock wave in the sample, and that this wave causes the crystal to anneal. Because the laser pulses are short (nanoseconds), the process is expected to be accompanied by much less diffusion than occurs in thermal processes. Diffusion is one of the limiting factors in the design and fabrication of next-generation high density low power devices. A "critical need" for the semiconductor industry, as stated by SIA, is the development of a "minimum anneal" for low leakage shallow junctions. The above mentioned non-thermal process is clearly a candidate for this "minimum anneal". While the process is attractive for a step in device fabrication, there are fundamental questions that must first be answered. The two most pressing questions involve the optimum parameters for annealing, and the actual mechanism by which the annealing occurs. Determination of optimum parameters will allow the technique to be applied to a variety of different materials, and eventually to patterned devices. Understanding of the annealing mechanism will further understanding of the materials science aspects of the project, and will also assist in the application of the technique to different materials. The answers to these questions will be obtained by further experiments which vary the parameters involved in the annealing process, by investigating alternated methods of achieving annealing without the introduction of thermal energy, and by modeling the passage of a shock wave through a damaged crystal lattice. ***
