Deterministic Shallow Dopant Implantation in Silicon with Detection Confidence Upper-Bound to 99.85% by Ion-Solid...

Silicon chips containing arrays of single dopant atoms can be the material of choice for classical and quantum devices that exploit single donor spins. For example, group-V donors implanted in isotopically purified ²⁸ Si crystals are attractive for large-scale quantum computers. Useful attributes include long nuclear and electron spin lifetimes of ³¹ P, hyperfine clock transitions in ²⁰⁹ Bi or electrically controllable ¹²³ Sb nuclear spins. Promising architectures require the ability to fabricate arrays of individual near-surface dopant atoms with high yield. Here, an on-chip detector electrode system with 70 eV root-mean-square noise (≈20 electrons) is employed to demonstrate near-room-temperature implantation of single 14 keV ³¹ P⁺ ions. The physics model for the ion-solid interaction shows an unprecedented upper-bound single-ion-detection confidence of 99.85 ± 0.02% for near-surface implants. As a result, the practical controlled silicon doping yield is limited by materials engineering factors including surface gate oxides in which detected ions may stop. For a device with 6 nm gate oxide and 14 keV ³¹ P⁺ implants, a yield limit of 98.1% is demonstrated. Thinner gate oxides allow this limit to converge to the upper-bound. Deterministic single-ion implantation can therefore be a viable materials engineering strategy for scalable dopant architectures in silicon devices.