We investigated the misfit dislocation(MD) nucleation and the dislocation morphology in lightly boron-doped Si epitaxial layers (20 Ωcm) on heavily boron-doped Si (001) wafer (0.015 Ωcm) (p/p+ Si) using white beam diffraction topography (WBDT) and high resolution x-ray diffractometry (XRD). The strain-relaxing MDs start to nucleate from the wafer edge and proceed to the center. Interestingly a dislocation slip-band morphology together with an orthogonal array of <110> type dislocations is able to be observed by WBDT, which has not been reported by conventional x-ray topography. The dislocation slip-bands are misoriented each other as measured by XRD. The misorientation gradually increases with approaching to the wafer edge. The existence of lattice misorientation is also confirmed by black-and-white dislocation contrast in x-ray topographs. These results indicate that the formation of cross-hatch patterns in p/p+ Si is caused by multiplication mechanism in MD nucleation, eventually enabling the strain field of MDs to extend to the top surface of the epitaxial layer.

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1. Grain orientation-location measurement by combined use of x-ray topography with diffractometry