Investigation on the impact of hydrogen on the passivation of silicon surface states in clean and copper contaminated conditions

Hydrogen is identified as a useful technique to passivate defects within crystalline silicon. However, the effect of hydrogen passivation for a silicon surface is normally characterized as a reduction in surface recombination velocity (SRV), which is not enough to reflect the detailed changes of electronic properties, such as defect density, defect energy levels, and capture cross section, of silicon surface states. In this paper, we utilized the transient capacitance measurement to characterize the detailed electronic properties of silicon surface states before and after hydrogenation. The differences, in terms of the effects of hydrogenation on silicon surface states, either in copper contaminated conditions or clean conditions, are presented and discussed.