Measuring doping profiles of silicon detectors with a custom-designed probe station

Silicon detectors are often used in High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments as tracking and vertexing devices. Many scientific institutes are equipped with setups able to electrically characterize those detectors e.g. for quality assurance reasons. Such probe stations can be easily extended to measure resistivities and doping profiles in the bulk material and in doped regions by using the Spreading Resistance Probe (SRP) technique. After an introduction to the method, this paper describes how an existing probe station, that has been used for electrical measurements on strip detectors, has been modified to perform SRP measurements. The presented results prove that the method is reliable and capable of characterizing doping regions as thin as one micron. Beside profiling implants, SRP measurements have the potential to deliver the basis for investigations of bulk material defects in heavily irradiated samples.