Wissenschaftliche Artikel der BAM
Filtern
Dokumenttyp
- Zeitschriftenartikel (2) (entfernen)
Sprache
- Englisch (2)
Referierte Publikation
- ja (2)
Schlagworte
- Elemental composition (2)
- Thin films (2)
- EPMA (1)
- Electron probe microanalysis (1)
- FeNi (1)
- Film thickness (1)
- SiGe (1)
- X-ray Fluorescence (1)
Organisationseinheit der BAM
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).
The present study reports on results of analysis of the elemental composition of thin films by electron probe microanalysis with energy dispersive (ED-EPMA) X-ray spectrometry in conjunction with the dedicated thin-film analysis software package Stratagem and by X-ray fluorescence in its version with a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence (μ-XRF) source attached to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Two thin-film systems have been analyzed: Fe1-xNix on silicon wafer and Si1-xGex on Al2O3 substrate, in both cases the layers being grown to a thickness of about 200 nm by ion beam sputter deposition. Samples of five different atomic fractions have been produced and analyzed for each thin-film system. Moreover, reference samples with certified elemental composition and thickness have been also available. This study is part of an interlaboratory comparison organized in the frame of standardization technical committee ISO/TC 201 “Surface chemical analysis.” Two laboratories have been analyzed by ED-EPMA (one laboratory standardless and one laboratory using both standardless and with standards variants) and one laboratory by μ-XRF (standardless and with standards). All the elemental compositions obtained with different methods are in very good agreement for the complete two sets of five samples each.