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Product Briefing Outline: HORIBA Jobin Yvon has introduced the MM-16, a spectroscopic ellipsometer dedicated to the advanced characterization of film thickness and optical constants for a broad range of materials such as semiconductors, compounds, alloys and organic thin films.

Problem: Spectroscopic ellipsometers allow the accurate characterization of a range of properties including the layer thickness, optical constants, composition, crystallinity, anisotropy, and uniformity. Thickness determinations ranging from a few angstroms to tens of microns are possible for single layers and complex multilayer stacks.

Solution: The MM-16 has a simple optical configuration using liquid crystals (LCs) as polarizer. Each ellipsometer head contains two LC modulators, each modulator having two possible polarisation states. The MM-16 is unique in its ability to collect full spectral ellipsometric data at high resolution and calculate the complete 16-element Mueller Matrix in <2 seconds. This allows simple characterization of complex birefringent materials, and also simplifies the investigation of samples exhibiting depolarization effects. These unique capabilities fulfil the requirements for standard thin film metrology as well as many emerging applications using complex materials and structures in the display, biotechnology, packaging and semiconductor areas.

Applications: Characterization of thin films deposited on transparent substrates such as those found in OLED, solar cell, or photovoltaic cells. It can also be used for dielectric film, metals, resist and polymer characterization.

Platform: The MM-16 is controlled from the DeltaPsi2 integrated software package to provide turnkey operation for a wide range of industrial and research applications.

Availability: July 2006 onwards.