Measure and provide feedback for curvature, stress, reflectivity and growth rate to improve production processes and increase profitability with the kSA MOS.

kSA MOS for thin-film stress measurement animation

Understanding and controlling stress in thin-film and thermal annealing processes is critical for achieving the desired optical, electronic, and mechanical properties. Many of today’s high performance devices rely on or must be designed with “built-in” stress within the individual layers for tailoring specific characteristics. However, unwanted changes in thin-film stress can be introduced at any stage of the fabrication process and may lead to a reduction in device performance as well as delamination or cracking of deposited films.

Traditional ex situ stress/strain measurement methods such as XRD or surface profiling only measure the overall stress after the process is done, but completely miss the dynamic changes in thin-film stress occurring during the process. Being able to measure the stress/strain in situ, during the process gives important insight into mechanisms and methods for controlling and targeting the overall stress induced into the sample during every step.

For more information see the Product Specification Sheet →

Software Capabilities

  • Complete data acquisition and analysis control.
  • Automatic laser spot detection.
  • Automatic camera exposure control to ensure no saturation of detector as surface reflectivity changes.
  • Real-time plotting of intensity, reflectivity, differential spot spacing, stress-thickness product, strain, and radius of curvature.
  • Data acquisition modes:
    • 1) Focus mode: for facilitating laser alignment and optics focusing by simultaneously monitoring the image and a line profile of the laser spot array.
    • 2) Curvature/Strain Mode: An arbitrary number of laser spots, user configured, are tracked simultaneously; yielding time-resolved radius of curvature measurements, mean differential spot spacing, stress, reflectivity, and intensity.  The mean differential spot spacing is used to calculate time resolved stress or stress thickness product using material parameters.
  • For time-resolved acquisition modes, a delay time between image acquisitions, may be selected.
  • External triggering can be used to time data acquisition with external events or substrate rotation.
  • Analysis Capabilities:
    • 1) Line profile for accurate determination of beam profiles.
    • 2) Radius of curvature and strain analysis.  User input of physical geometry and substrate parameters yields calculation of radius of curvature, stress-thickness product, or relative stress as a function of time, temperature, or other user configurable input.  Alternatively, simple centroid position and spot separation distance may be plotted.
  • Data storage in ASCII, Excel or binary file formats facilitate alternative data analysis by user.
  • User-friendly Windows 10-standard environment with extensive error checking and file handling. Data storage in ASCII, Excel or binary file formats facilitate alternative data analysis by user.  Direct printing of images or graphics using currently loaded Windows printer drivers.  Cut-and-paste directly to clipboard, or into other applications such as MS Word or PowerPoint.
  • High-quality 2D and 3D graphics for data display. Numerous image and graphics editing capabilities, including false coloring using pre-loaded or user-defined color palettes, and label editing.  Transport of graphics directly to Windows clipboard or exported to Windows Metafile, Tiff or Bitmap format.
  • Complete TCP/IP interface for custom, real-time data transfer and program control. Ability to write to an SQL database.  Analog and Digital I/O capability with optional hardware (quoted separately).

Optional Software

kSA MOS Analysis Only Software Sentinel Key (M-AOS)

M-AOS option is an analysis-only software sentinel key that allows complete kSA MOS functionality, with the exception of data acquisition.  It is designed for users who want to perform post acquisition, display, processing and analysis away from the laboratory.

Growth Rate Monitor Option for kSA MOS Software (MOS-GM)

As an add-on to the standard MOS software, the MOS-GM software option offers:

  • Reflected intensity oscillation data recorded during growth can provide accurate growth rate and optical constant determination for semi-transparent films.
  • Real-time update of current n, k, deposition rate, and standard deviation of these values.
  • Ability to generate a thin-film deposition recipe, so multiple layers can be properly fit in real-time. Each layer in the recipe will have a user-estimated n, k, and G value.  Each layer can be triggered via a time-based kSA MOS software recipe or an external trigger signal (with the purchase of additional A/D communications options or via the integrated TCP/IP protocol.)
  • Optional ability to output growth rate, thickness, n, and k to analog output channels for input into process control system.

References

View All References
Thin Film and Industrial Metrology Systems

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