XPS study of multilayer multicomponent films

In the paper, we propose an XPS-based quantitative method for depth profile analysis of chemical and phase composition of multi-component and multi-layer samples. The method includes: (1) new method for background subtraction accounting for depth non-uniformity of electron energy losses; (2) new method for photoelectron line decomposition into elementary peaks, which accounts for physical nature of the decomposition parameters; (3) joint solving of both background subtraction and photoelectron line decomposition problems; (4) criterion for assessing of line decomposition accuracy; (5) simple formula for layer thickness extraction for multi-element and multi-layer sample. We apply the developed method for analysis of multilayer niobium oxide and sub-oxide films before and in course of ion milling.