TY - JOUR A1 - Terborg, R. A1 - Kim, K. J. A1 - Hodoroaba, Vasile-Dan T1 - Elemental composition and thickness determination of thin films by electron probe microanalysis T2 - Surface and Interface Analysis N2 - Electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) applies to solid samples of homogenous (bulk) chemical composition and can usually not be applied to structures which are inhomogeneous in the micrometer range such as thin film systems down to a few nm. However, in combination with the established thin film software Stratagem, the thickness as well as the elemental composition of thin films on a substrate can be determined. This has been recently successfully demonstrated for Fe-Ni on Si and Si-Ge on Al2O3 thin film systems. For both systems five samples of different elemental composition and a reference were produced and characterised by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), Rutherford backscattering (RBS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) as reference values. Last year, a new and open-source thin film evaluation programme called BadgerFilm has been released. It can also be used to determine thin film composition and thickness from intensity ratios of the unknown sample and standards (k-ratios). In this contribution, we reevaluated the data acquired for the Fe-Ni and Si-Ge systems using the BadgerFilm software package and compared the obtained elemental compositions and thickness values with the results of the Stratagem software and the reference methods. The conclusion is that the BadgerFilm software shows good agreement with the elemental composition and thickness calculated by Stratagem (mostly <2% for both composition and thickness) and with the reference values for two representative thin film systems (<1%–2% for composition and <10%–20% for thickness). PB - Wiley KW - Elemental composition KW - EPMA KW - Film thickness KW - Thin films PY - 2023 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57636 AN - OPUS4-57636 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-576368 SN - 0142-2421 VL - 55 SP - 496 EP - 500 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany