SBIR-STTR Award

This project is to assess the feasibility of an instrument to provide energy-filtered electron images of a specimen at least 10mm by 10mm in size, operating over a 50-900eV energy range and suitable for NEXAFS chemical imaging. The applicant proposes to demonstrate feasibility by delivering a suitable electron-optical design along with calculated performance characteristics. Knowledge of the existing journal and patent literaturemakes the applicant confident that a practical design can be discovered. The applicant's key personnel have demonstrated a mastery of the art and science of charged-particle optics simulations and the model is a sufficient demonstration of feasibility. In one likely design approach, the system includes the specimen, a first electrostatic lens system, a spherical electric field energy filter, a second electrostatic lens system, and a two-dimensional imaging detector system. The specimen would be kept grounded and field-free. The first lens system demagnifies, adjusts energy, and transforms the spatial information in preparation for the energy filter. The second lens system provides the inverse operations and directs the electrons onto the detector

Two distinct designs with performance characteristics for analyzers consistent with the solicitation requirements were delivered in Phase 1. The Phase 1 research and modeling results have been sufficiently conclusive to indicate feasibility of both designs. The more novel of the two designs is proposed: a hybrid magnetic/electrostatic analyzer that features very high collection and transmission efficiencies. In this design, the specimen is immersed in a magnetic field parallel to the axis of the analyzer. The proposed design provides for extremely uniform collection efficiency over a large area while preserving excellent lateral resolution. In one application this design, combined with a tunable wide area soft-xrays illumination will provide the ability to identify chemical bond information utilizing the NEXAFS technique. COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: There are several relevant industries that should find use for a spectrometer that can offer practical large area chemical mapping capabilities combined with the sub-monolayer surface sensitivity and precision achievable through electron spectroscopies. These capabilities are particularily important in the semiconductor industry for a number of processes, such as nitrided gate oxide uniformity mapping and statistical analysis of advanced thin-film desposition technologies such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) processes. Other possible application areas include mesoscopic chemical distribution studies of surfaces in the biological and biomedical industries and time dependent studies of chemical distribution changes over large scale dimensions. Capabilities would also be of interest in the Magnetic thin-film disk industries for tribological studies for the head disk interface