Early Stages of Oxygen Precipitation in Silicon

It was fOlllld as long ago as 1954 that heating oxygen rich silicon to around 450°C produced electrical active defects - the so called thermal donors. The inference was that the donors were created by some defect produced by the aggregation of oxygen. Since then, there has been an enor­ mous amount of work carried out to elucidate the detailed mechanism by which they, and other defects, are genera...