Numerical simulation of the effect of gold doping on the resistance to neutron irradiation of silicon diodes

Abstract

We have carried out a numerical simulation of the effect of gold doping on the electrical characteristics of long silicon diodes exposed to neutron irradiation. The aim is to investigate the effect of gold on the hardness of the irradiated diodes. The reverse current voltage and capacitance voltage characteristics of doped and undoped diodes are calculated for different irradiation doses. The leakage current and the effective doping density are extracted from these two characteristics respectively. The hardness of the diodes is evaluated from the evolution of the leakage current and the effective doping density with irradiation doses. It was found that diodes doped with gold are less sensitive to irradiation than undoped ones. Thus gold appears to stabilise the electrical properties on irradiation. The conduction mechanism is studied by the evolution of the current with temperature. The evaluated activation energy indicates that as the gold doping or irradiation dose increases, the current switches from the basic diffusion to the generation-recombination process, and that it can even become ohmic for very high gold densities or irradiation doses.