ABSTRACT
Silicon, the key material for today’s integrated circuit fabrication technology, is often referred to as the king among semiconductors due to its usage and the exibility it offers in the processing of a wide variety of different devices and circuits. Silicon produced for the microelectronics industry is, by far, the purest and most perfect crystalline material manufactured at present for a wide range of applications. Many devices are fabricated routinely using silicon, and in large volumes. The advances in integrated circuit manufacturing achieved in recent years would not have been possible without parallel advances in studying silicon crystal quality and defect engineering evaluations. Essentially all practical problems, such as minority carrier lifetime, metal precipitation, stacking faults, etc. [1], associated with metal contaminants have largely been solved through advances in evaluating the purity of grown crystals.
