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Elemental composition and thickness determination of thin films by electron probe microanalysis
(2023)
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).
Characterization of Pd-Ni-Co alloy thin films by ED-EPMA with application of the STRATAGEM software
(2012)
Ternary thin film alloys based on Pd, Ni and Co on silicon wafers have been characterized in order to determine elemental composition and thickness. A broad variety of alloy compositions was obtained on one and the same substrate by magnetron dc-co-sputter deposition. Energy-dispersive electron probe X-ray microanalysis of these 'multi' alloy composition samples is performed in a non-destructive, precise and, if optimized, also in a time-saving way. The local thickness of the layers under study was in between 50 nm and 250 nm. Pure element bulk materials have been employed as reference specimens. The results attained in this study are compared to those obtained by other analytical methods as Auger electron spectroscopy and X-ray photo electron spectroscopy.