Thickness Measurement of Gold Film Coating on Glass Substrate by X-Ray Fluorescence Technique

Abstract

Thickness is considered as one of the important characteristics of thin film. Almost all offilm properties are related to film thickness such as electrical resistance, reflectance and transmittanceof light. The objective of this research work is to study the thickness measurement of thin film byusing X-ray fluorescence technique. Gold film samples have been coated on glass substrates byunbalanced magnetron sputtering system and measured the thickness by mass weighing and thenanalyzed the X-ray fluorescence intensity of Au Lb from films. The results showed that the goldfilms give very bright color of the gold, smooth surface and highly reflective. The thickness offilms in this study are 0.13-5.89 mm. The intensity of fluorescent X-ray of Au Lb from films arerelated to film thickness in exponential function and obeyed the fluorescent equation I_d=I_s (1-e^-ad)where I_d is the intensity of fluorescent X-rays from film thickness d, I_s is the saturated intensity offluorescent X-rays and a is linear attenuation coefficient. The thickness of films from mathematicalmodels is 95% in agreement with the experimental value.

Keywords : Thin Film / Film Thickness Measurement / Magnetron Sputtering / X-rayFluorescence