Hydrogen, microstructure and defect density in hydrogenated amorphous silicon

Abstract

It is well established that by bonding with the dangling bonds of silicon, hydrogen reduces the density of states of amorphous silicon and renders this material suitable to electronic applications. For so-called “standard” a-Si : H films deposited by the RF glow discharge decomposition of silane at low deposition rates (≈1 Å/s) and over a large range of deposition temperatures, we observed the usual correlation between the hydrogen bonding and the defect density in the as-deposited material only. It clearly appears that the widely accepted correlation between the hydrogen bonding, the microstructure and the defect density only applies to a limited set of deposition parameters. Moreover we found that the deposition of a-Si : H from mixtures of ................