Methods of determining the deep defect concentration

Two methods of determining the deep defect concentration are proposed from dependencies of photoconductance on illumination intensity and of carrier lifetime on injection-level. The methods are based on saturation of excess majority carrier density with increasing the illumination intensity and on abrupt decrease of majority carrier lifetime with increasing their excess concentration, which takes place as a result of filling of the defect level by minority carriers. In distinct from the well known injection-level spectroscopy, both of the methods allow to determine the defect density without knowing any of the defect parameters, like energy level, recombination coefficient of electrons and holes. These methods are applied to boron-doped single-crystalline silicon with radiation-induced deep defects of type phosphorus-vacancy, oxygen-vacancy and carbon-oxygen complexes. It is shown that these methods can be applied to semiconductors with deep defects which cause significant difference between the values of excess concentrations and lifetimes of electrons and holes.