Materials Research Laboratory

Sloan Dektak³

Location
B80 Materials Research Laboratory

General
Surface profilometry is a technique in which a diamond stylus, in contact with a sample, can measure minute physical surface variations as a function of position.

Instrumentation
The center operates a Sloan Dektak³ ST stylus surface profilometer for the measurement of surface topography. This instrument has the capability of measuring step height down to a few nm.

Features
The Dektak profilometer has two available stylii, 2.5 and 12.5 micrometer radius, and has a force variable between 1-40 mg allowing the capability to profile a wide variety of materials. The Dektak is controlled by a PC running Windows, making the system very easy to use. The software offers several data processing funtions as well as image capture and storage. The data can be easily converted to ASCII format and stored on a diskette for those requiring additional processing capabilities.

Applications
Surface profilometry is commonly used to measure film thickness in thin film deposition and processing. Another important application is the measurement of crater depths for those surface analysis methods such as secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) that use ion sputtering for depth profiling.

For More Information

Contact:
Steve Burdin
Center for Microanalysis of Materials
Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory
104 S. Goodwin Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
(217) 333-0386

sburdin@illinois.edu