Understanding the coupling between native point defects and dopants at high concentrations in silicon will be key to ultra shallow junction formation in silicon technology. Other effects, such as transient enhanced diffusion (TED) will become less important. In this paper, we first describe how thermodynamic properties of the two native point defects in silicon, namely vacancies and self-interstitials, have been obtained by studying self-diffusion in isotopically enriched structures. We then discuss what this tells us about dopant diffusion. In particular, we show that the diffusion of high concentration shallow dopant profiles is determined by the competition between the flux of mobile dopants and those of the native point defects. These fluxes are proportional to the interstitial or vacancy components of dopant and self-diffusion, respectively. This is why understanding the microscopic mechanisms of silicon self-diffusion is important in predicting and modeling the diffusion of ultra shallow dopant profiles. As an example, we show experimental data and simulation fits of how these coupling effects play a role in the annealing of shallow BF2 ion implantation profiles. We conclude that relatively low temperature furnace cycles following high temperature rapid thermal anneals (RTA) have a significant effect on the minimum junction depth that can be achieved.