Determination of the thickness and optical constants of thin films from transmission spectra (original) (raw)

Determination of thickness and optical constants of amorphous silicon films from transmittance data

Applied Physics Letters, 2000

This work presents the application of a recently developed numerical method to determine the thickness and the optical constants of thin films using experimental transmittance data only. This method may be applied to films not displaying a fringe pattern and is shown to work for a-Si:H (hydrogenated amorphous silicon) layers as thin as 100 nm. The performance and limitations of

Determination of the thickness and optical constants of amorphous silicon

The rigorous expression for the transmission of a thin absorbing film on a transparent substrate is manipulated to yield formulae in closed form for the refractive index and absorption coefficient. A procedure is presented to calculate the thickness to an accuracy of better than 190 with similar accuracies in the values of ti. A method to correct for errors due to slit width is also given. Various formulae to calculate the absorption coefficient accurately over almost three orders of magnitude are discussed. Only data from the transmission spectrum are used and the procedure is simple, fast and very accurate. All formulae are in closed form and can be used on a programmable pocket calculator.

DETERMINATION OF THE OPTICAL CONSTANTS OF THIN FILMS FROM OPTICAL TRANSMISSION DATA

Optical constants and thickness of thin films of ZnO, SnO and A_2 O_3 are obtained by fitting of transmittance data to model equations. The Swanepoel transmission equation was used as the custom equation in the MATLAB Software. Six constants are determined using the curve fitting toolbox in MATLAB application. The Cauchy dispersion equation was used to determine the refractive index, the refractive index of ZnO, SnO and A_2 O_3 are 2.096, 2.000 and 2.046 at 600nm and the extinction coefficients of 0.1056, 0.066256 and 0.143478 respectively. The accuracy of the optical constants and thickness was very accurate compared with those obtained from other methods. Optical constants and thickness can be obtained with high accuracy by fitting transmittance data.

A new approach to the determination of optical constants and thickness of thin dielectric transparent films

Journal of Materials Science Materials in Electronics

A new calculating method to deduce optical constants n, k and thickness d from the fringe pattern of the transmission spectrum is proposed. In this method the optical parameters are determined using only one curve of the transmission spectra even for thin films where nd /4. The method is demonstrated by experimental data obtained using evaporated vacuum deposited TiO2 thin film on a glass substrate. The experimental values are in very good agreement with those calculated using the above described technique.