Paper EW-TuL3
Multi-Dimensional XPS Profiling from Thermo Fisher Scientific

Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 12:40 pm, Room West Hall

X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) provides crucial surface specific chemistry information when evaluating any surface modification, thin film coating or the composition of electronic devices. Depth information from inorganic materials can be obtained by removing material by use of Ar ion sputtering, but organic material can be adversely affected by this process. More recently, noble gas cluster ion beam sources have been developed for profiling of organic materials. The development of a combined monatomic and gas cluster ion source (MAGCIS) allows for a single depth profile experiment to have both cluster and monatomic etching stages. This is ideal for the depth profiling of devices and structures with mixed inorganic and organic layers.

When dealing with the analysis of small features, such as bond pads and tracks for electronic devices, Parallel Imaging XPS provides unmatched spatial resolution for XPS analysis. Reconstructing a spectrum from a chosen area on a spectroscopic parallel XPS image gives the analyst absolute confidence in the area from which that spectrum was obtained. The combination of retrospective spectroscopy from image stacks with a depth profiling capability within a single experiment gives the surface scientist a valuable tool for parallel multi-point depth profile analysis. Processing the large multi-dimensional data sets produced from such experiments requires a sophisticated range of statistical analysis tools, provided within the Avantage software.