Treatment of LESIMS Depth Profiles: a Procedure for Eliminating the Roughness Effect

In this paper, we investigated the problem of the deconvolution of SIMS depth profiles analyzed at low primary energy (1keV/O⁺ ₂), in particular in presence of roughness. This phenomenon leads to a variant depth resolution function (VDRF). To describe the DRF variations with depth, we have established a matrix slightly different from the classical Teoplitz matrix. Then by using the matrix formalism we give a generalization to the case of VDRF of an algorithm implemented initially in Fourier space. The variant deconvolution procedure is first tested on simulated profile by using this algorithm and Van-Cittert algorithm with Miller regularization; we show a great improvement of the depth resolution and we observed that our modified algorithm is far better. The algorithm is then implemented on samples containing delta-doped layers of boron in silicon. It was shown that if the adequate estimation of the VDRF is available, we can obtain the best result