System and method of semiconductor characterization

A method for enhancing the accuracy of an analysis system for characterizing a semiconductor sample, said analysis system comprising:

• a transient photoconductive decay measurement subsystem,
• a database,
• a data analysis subsystem, and
• a statistical analysis subsystem,
• said transient photoconductive decay measurement subsystem, database, data analysis subsystem and statistical analysis subsystem connected to each other by an interconnection,
• said interconnection implemented using at least one of wireless, wired and optical media;
• said method comprising the steps of:
• shining, using the transient photoconductive decay measurement subsystem, light on one or more points in said semiconductor sample;
• measuring, using the transient photoconductive decay measurement subsystem, one or more voltage decay curves corresponding to said shining of light on said one or more points in said semiconductor sample;
• extracting, using the data analysis subsystem, one or more intermediate voltage decay curves corresponding to the one or more measured voltage decay curves;
• obtaining, using the data analysis subsystem, one or more normalized decay curves corresponding to one or more intermediate voltage decay curves, each of the said one or more normalized decay curves corresponding to one or more discrete estimates of survival functions, and said obtaining performed so as to enhance accuracy of further processing by the statistical analysis subsystem and thereby operation of the analysis system;
• analyzing, using the statistical analysis subsystem, said obtained one or more normalized decay curves, said analyzing comprising
• obtaining one or more discrete estimates of the probability of recombination corresponding to the one or more normalized decay curves, and
• computing one or more summary statistics corresponding to each of said obtained one or more discrete estimates;
• and
• based on results of said analyzing, determining, by the statistical analysis subsystem or the data analysis subsystem, presence of nonuniformities within said semiconductor sample.