MicroXRR & MicroHRXRD
EAG has a new highly customized XRD/XRR instrument to help our clients solve challenging problems that require the analysis of small areas or volumes.
The Eurofins EAG XRD/XRR lab routinely analyzes both polycrystalline and epitaxial thin films. XRR data provides information about film density, thickness, and roughness. Typical XRD analyses include qualitative phase identification, semi-quantitative phase analysis, %crystallinity, crystallite size, texture, residual stress and much more. Due to film thickness, data for many of these analyses are acquired by grazing incidence XRD (GIXRD) to maximize the X-ray signal from the film and minimize any interference from the substrate. High-resolution XRD (HRXRD) is used to measure composition and strain/relaxation of epitaxial thin films.
Due to the very shallow incidence angles used in both XRR and GIXRD data acquisition, the irradiated area is large, i.e. often more than 30mm in length on traditional XRD/XRR instrumentation. While this is generally not a problem when analyzing blanket wafers or larger cleaved pieces, it is increasingly of interest to our customers to be able to make the same measurements on small areas on device wafers or on very small samples where currently the irradiated area is much larger than the desired small sample dimensions.
Our existing microdiffractometer has a spot size as small as 25μm and a 2D area detector. This system achieves a small incident X-ray spot size by using a convergent X-ray beam. This is great for many samples, but unfortunately, a convergent beam is not appropriate for either XRR or for GIXRD and does not have sufficient energy resolution to perform HRXRD analyses. The current instrument also does not have enough energy discrimination to reduce fluorescence effects. With these limitations in mind, a search began for an instrument design that would allow us to make typical thin film analyses on samples as small as 2×2mm or at this restricted dimension within larger samples. We call these analyses microXRR, microGIXRD and microHRXRD to differentiate them from more standard work we currently do on much larger areas.
After a lengthy evaluation, we selected a micro high resolution system. Download our resources to learn more!
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