A versatile spectrometer system for quantitative surface and in-depth analysis with secondary ion and secondary neutral mass spectroscopy, Auger electron and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

Abstract

Recently, secondary neutral mass spectrometry (SNMS) has proved to be a fast and accurate technique for quantitative surface and bulk analysis of trace elements and multicomponent materials. The lack of sufficient chemical information urges the need of combination of this method with complementary analytical techniques such as secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). We describe a fully computerized surface analytical instrument, in which electron-beam SNMS, SIMS, AES, and XPS have been implemented for the first time in the same UHV system. We particularly discuss aspects of depth resolution, as obtained with each of the methods, and the need of a flexible computer-based control and data acquisition system for reliability and flexibility of the analytical instrumentation. Typical applications to depth profiles of multicomponent semiconductor materials include analysis of amorphous hydrogenated carbon (a-C:H) layers on germanium and of copper contacts on mercury cadmium telluride (CdxHg1−xTe).