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

This work presents the application of a recently developed numerical method to determine the thickness and the optical constants of thin films using e xperimental transmittance data only. This method may be applied to films no t 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 limitatio ns of the method are discussed on the basis of experiments performed on a s eries of six a-Si:H samples grown under identical conditions, but with thic kness varying from 98 nm to 1.2 mu m. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physic s. [S0003-6951(00)02540-7].