Depth profiling of dopants implanted in Si using the synchrotron radiation based high-resolution grazing emission technique

We report on the surface-sensitive grazing emission X-ray fluorescence technique combined with synchrotron radiation excitation and high-resolution detection to realize depth-profile measurements of Al-implanted Si wafers. The principles of grazing emission measurements as well as the benefits offered by synchrotron sources and wavelength-dispersive detection setups are presented. It is shown that the depth distribution of implanted ions can be extracted from the dependence of the X-ray fluorescence intensity on the grazing emission angle with nanometer-scale precision provided that an analytical function describing the shape of the depth distribution is assumed beforehand. If no a priori assumption is made, except a bell shaped form for the dopant distribution, the profile derived from the measured angular distribution is found to reproduce quite satisfactorily the depth distribution of the implanted ions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.