AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition
    Applied Surface Science Wednesday Sessions
       Session AS+BI+MC-WeA

Paper AS+BI+MC-WeA8
Industrial Applications of Surface Analysis

Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 4:40 pm, Room 316

Session: Practical Surface Analysis I
Presenter: William Stickle, Hewlett Packard
Authors: W.F. Stickle, Hewlett Packard
M.D. Johnson, Hewlett Packard
G.A. DeHaan, Hewlett Packard
J.A. Burgess, Hewlett Packard
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Using surface analysis has been a mainstay of industrial research and corporate analytical labs for more than thirty years. The applications of surface chemical analysis in an industrial setting range from the investigation of the composition and chemistry of buried interfaces of single molecule memory devices created in the R&D lab to the routine analysis of plasma treated polymer surfaces on the production line. Some analyses are performed to provide a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to question such as ‘Has the oxide been removed?’ or ‘Was the surface plasma treated?’. Other analyses are much more complicated and often require the application and correlation of several analytical methods. This correlation between techniques often occurs in the characterization of, for example, fab processes where a process may be characterized by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to understand the chemistry; but then the analysis needs to correlate to the information obtained by Auger electron spectroscopy or ToF SIMS which are the techniques of choice when the process is scaled to dimensions where XPS is not practical. Further, simple data processing, such as calculating atomic concentrations, is often not the end of the analytical story. Examples of using numerical methods such as linear least squares fitting or the application of Tougaard backgrounds to clarify an analysis will also be discussed. More detailed analyses can also be achieved by applying modeling methods such as SESSA or using simple overlayer models to describe a material. This presentation will cover these different aspects of surface chemical analysis in an industrial laboratory with practical examples of using XPS, AES and ToF SIMS for process characterization, materials development and failure analysis.