Improving radiation resilience of zener diodes through preemptive and restorative electron wind force annealing

Semiconductor devices contain defects and localized mechanical stress even in their pristine states, persisting after post-fabrication annealing. We hypothesize that these pre-existing conditions, with their lower threshold energy for defect proliferation and/or ionization, may serve as nuclei for radiation damage. To test this hypothesis, we adopted a two-pronged approach: (a) performing electron wind force (EWF) annealing preemptively on pristine Zener diodes to eliminate pre-existing defects before radiation exposure, and (b) applying EWF annealing restoratively on devices already damaged by radiation. The EWF process is non-thermal and can eliminate defects below 30 °C that persist through conventional thermal annealing. Both pristine and EWF-annealed pristine devices were exposed to 15 MeV protons with a fluence of 10¹⁴ cm⁻². Radiation damage increased the ideality factor from 1 to 2.33 in the pristine devices, while the preemptively EWF-annealed devices showed remarkable resilience, with an ideality factor of 1.5. Similar performance improvements were observed with restorative EWF annealing on radiation-damaged devices. This resilience and recovery in performance are further supported by Raman spectroscopy indicating enhanced crystallinity compared to the pristine condition. These findings demonstrate the potential of EWF annealing as both a protective and restorative treatment for semiconductor devices in high-radiation environments.