SiO2 on SiC using BadgerFilm from DTSA-II

[mjpavel]

Cross-posting from the badgerfilm thread as this one seems to get more attention

Hello I have recently come across this community for thin film analysis using EPMA and am wondering if the following situation is calculable using BadgerFilm:

- estimating the thickness of an SiO2 layer (ranging from 30nm - 500nm) formed on an SiC substrate using EDS

I have pieced together a pathway using other posts from this website which led me to using multi-voltage analysis from 3kev to 10 kev and assuming a fixed composition for the SiO2 layer and extracting k-ratios from DTSA II which I had previously been using for just quant eds

I tried using DTSA II to simulate a 100nm film of SiO2 on SiC at 3, 5,  7, and 10kev, and then simulating SiO2 and SiC standards for quantifying the film spectra (These are the standards I would likely use in my actual quant EDS experiments). Using those k-ratios I calculated a thickness in badgerfilm and my results are not promising - using every combination of fitting I converge to ~250nm. My fitted output also does not look great - the k ratios all follow a trend which I can visually see quite well, however the fitting is not good. Is this sort of a core limitation of the technique or is there something else I should look in to?

Thanks!