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Wednesday, 07 March 2007 08:36 |
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Page 1 of 3 Overview
Thin coatings are increasingly being used in many industries to improve surface properties of materials, such as increased resistance to friction and wear or increasing the hardness and strength. Hard coatings like TiN are particularly useful in the coating of machine tools in extending the working life of the tool, where the properties of the thin film depend on the thickness and the adhesion between the coating and the substrate. This information can be gained using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) which provides qualitative and quantitative information on the elements present in complex materials and whilst providing chemical state information from these elements.
The Use of AMICUS
AMICUS, with its high energy X-ray source, efficient electron transfer lens, electron energy analyser and high speed ion etching, is ideally suited to elemental depth profiling. The AMICUS instrument was used to determine the depth dependent concentration profile through a thin TiN/SiO2 double layer film. To ensure good interface resolution between layers the X-ray photoelectron spectra were recorded from a small, 3mm2 sample which was rotated during sputtering to ensure an even etch crater. Figure 1 shows the data acquisition manager of the fully automated VISION control software. Complex data collection procedures are performed by means of a simple flowchart which may be saved and recalled for future analysis of similar samples. The use of the integrated VISION control software means that the analysis/sputter routine may be left to generate a complete concentration depth profile dataset unsupervised.  Figure 1: VISION data collection window.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 07 March 2007 08:51 |
Application Topics 
