The precipitate behavior in a floating zone silicon crystal produced from a Czochralski single-crystal ingot has been studied. Large precipitates of α-Si3N4 crystal, having a dimension of about 2 μm, were formed at the mid-depth in the wafer by means of annealing at a high temperature in an ambient N2 (70%) + O2 (30%) atmosphere. The precipitate number detected by cross-sectional X-ray topography increased with the increasing annealing time. Interstitial silicon is expected to eliminate the precipitate origins.

Diamond is a unique material in many respects. One of the most well-known extreme properties of diamond is its ultrahardness. This property of diamond actually turns out to have interesting consequences for charge transport, in particular at low temperatures. In fact, the strong covalent bonds that give rise to the ultrahardness results in a lack of short wavelength lattice vibrations which has a strong impact on both electron and hole scattering. In some sense diamond behaves more like a vacuum than other semiconductor materials. In this paper we describe some interesting charge transport properties of diamond and discuss possible novel electronic applications.