The surface and sub-surface damage induced by processing is a major concern for the Si advanced sub-micron technologies. The interest in characterization techniques which allow monitoring of the modifications of the surface electrical properties of the Si wafers is, therefore, growing. The surface recombination velocity is the parameter more directly correlated to the recombination activity of the surface, and, therefore, more sensitive to the changes in the surface electronic properties, but its measurement, up to now, has not been assessed enough. We have measured the surface recombination velocity by two independent methods: the photoelectromagnetic effect (PEM) and the electron beam induced current (EBIC) mode of a scanning electron microscope (SEM), in order to test the reliability of the techniques and to correlate the macroscopic value obtained by PEM with the local values obtained by EBIC. In this …