By IONTOF GmbH
The continuous development of the sputter performance has opened new fields for time-of-flight dual beam depth profiling. Sputter rates in the range of 10 µm/h can be obtained making depth profiling in the µm range possible. The pulsed nature of the technique makes it also well-suited for the profiling of insulators. This feature in combination with the parallel mass detection makes TOF-SIMS dual beam depth profiling best suited for the analysis of unknowns (e. g. reverse engineering, failure analysis, interface analysis, etc.). The example below is typical for failure analysis. The two profiles were acquired on one “good” and one “bad” sample. The differences in the layer structure and thickness can clearly be seen. This renders it possible to draw conclusions about the cause of the failure.
