Characterization of dislocations in germanium layers grown on (011)- and (111)-oriented silicon by coplanar and noncoplanar X-ray diffraction

Strained germanium grown on silicon with nonstandard surface orientations like (011) or (111) is a promising material for various semiconductor applications, for example complementary metal-oxide semiconductor transistors. However, because of the large mismatch between the lattice constants of silicon and germanium, the growth of such systems is challenged by nucleation and propagation of threading and misfit dislocations that degrade the electrical properties. To analyze the dislocation microstructure of Ge films on Si(011) and Si(111), a set of reciprocal space maps and profiles measured in noncoplanar geometry was collected. To process the data, the approach proposed by Kaganer, Köhler, Schmidbauer, Opitz & Jenichen [Phys. Rev. B, (1997 ▶), 55, 1793–1810] has been generalized to an arbitrary surface orientation, arbitrary dislocation line direction and noncoplanar measurement scheme.