Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Lecture

Inspection and Metrology: Thin Film Measurement Techniques

In course

MICRO-621: MOOC: Micro and Nanofabrication (MEMS)

Micro- and nanofabrication can be taught to students and professionals by textbooks and ex-cathedra lectures, but the real learning comes from seeing the manufacturing steps as they happen. This MOOC will not only explain the basics of microfabrication but ...

Description

This lecture covers various techniques for measuring thin film thickness in micro and nanofabrication processes, including optical reflectometry, transmittometry, ellipsometry, and spectroscopic ellipsometry. It explains the physical principles behind these methods, such as normal reflectance, transmittance, and changes in light properties. The lecture also discusses the process of measuring SiO2 thickness using bi-morph wafers and the importance of good spectrum fitting. Additionally, it explores the use of ellipsometers for measuring thin films and compares the advantages of reflectometers and ellipsometers in terms of accuracy and methodology, emphasizing their non-contact and non-invasive nature.

In MOOC

Micro and Nanofabrication (MEMS)

Instructors (2)

Jürgen Brugger

I am a Professor of Microengineering and co-affiliated to Materials Science. Before joining EPFL I was at the MESA Research Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, in Tokyo, Japan. I received a Master in Physical-Electronics and a PhD degree from Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Research in my laboratory focuses on various aspects of MEMS and Nanotechnology. My group contributes to the field at the fundamental level as well as in technological development, as demonstrated by the start-ups that spun off from the lab. In our research, key competences are in micro/nanofabrication, additive micro-manufacturing, new materials for MEMS, increasingly for wearable and biomedical applications. Together with my students and colleagues we published over 200 peer-refereed papers and I had the pleasure to supervise over 25 PhD students. Former students and postdocs have been successful in receiving awards and starting their own scientific careers. I am honoured for the appointment in 2016 as Fellow of the IEEE “For contributions to micro and nano manufacturing technology”. In 2017 my lab was awarded an ERC AdvG in the field of advanced micro-manufacturing.

Martinus Adela Maria Gijs

Martin A.M. Gijs received his degree in physics in 1981 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and his Ph.D. degree in physics at the same university in 1986. He joined the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1987. Subsequently, he has worked there on micro-and nano-fabrication processes of high critical temperature superconducting Josephson and tunnel junctions, the microfabrication of microstructures in magnetic multilayers showing the giant magnetoresistance effect, the design and realisation of miniaturised motors for hard disk applications and the design and realisation of planar transformers for miniaturised power applications. He joined EPFL in 1997. His present interests are in developing technologies for novel magnetic devices, new microfabrication technologies for microsystems fabrication in general and the development and use of microsystems technologies for microfluidic and biomedical applications in particular.

Official source

Related concepts (12)

Ellipsometry

Ellipsometry is an optical technique for investigating the dielectric properties (complex refractive index or dielectric function) of thin films. Ellipsometry measures the change of polarization upon reflection or transmission and compares it to a model. It can be used to characterize composition, roughness, thickness (depth), crystalline nature, doping concentration, electrical conductivity and other material properties. It is very sensitive to the change in the optical response of incident radiation that interacts with the material being investigated.

Thin film

A thin film is a layer of material ranging from fractions of a nanometer (monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films (a process referred to as deposition) is a fundamental step in many applications. A familiar example is the household mirror, which typically has a thin metal coating on the back of a sheet of glass to form a reflective interface. The process of silvering was once commonly used to produce mirrors, while more recently the metal layer is deposited using techniques such as sputtering.

Thin-film solar cell

Thin-film solar cells are made by depositing one or more thin layers (thin films or TFs) of photovoltaic material onto a substrate, such as glass, plastic or metal. Thin-film solar cells are typically a few nanometers (nm) to a few microns (μm) thick–much thinner than the wafers used in conventional crystalline silicon (c-Si) based solar cells, which can be up to 200 μm thick. Thin-film solar cells are commercially used in several technologies, including cadmium telluride (CdTe), copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), and amorphous thin-film silicon (a-Si, TF-Si).

Atomic layer deposition

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin-film deposition technique based on the sequential use of a gas-phase chemical process; it is a subclass of chemical vapour deposition. The majority of ALD reactions use two chemicals called precursors (also called "reactants"). These precursors react with the surface of a material one at a time in a sequential, self-limiting, manner. A thin film is slowly deposited through repeated exposure to separate precursors.

Outer measure