Advanced Electrostatic Langmuir Probe for plasma
characterisation and uniformity monitoring
Hiden Analytical introduce ESPION
- an advanced Langmuir style probe for fast, automated, real-time
analysis of fundamental plasma characteristics including electrical
parameters, stability and uniformity. With high speed data acquisition
and gating edge-trigger resolution to 100 nanoseconds the high speed
state-of-the-art control set is equally suited to monitoring of continuous
plasma and of pulsed plasma at repetition rates up to 300 kHz.
Run-to-run conformity is established through diverse pressure, gas
composition and power/impedance states by direct analysis of electron
and ion densities, plasma potential and electron temperature and energy
distribution functions, the compact probe design presenting accurate
spatially resolved measurements with minimum plasma perturbation. An
integrated reference Electrode actively tracks and eliminates low frequency
plasma potential fluctuations, a sophisticated passive compensation
network providing RF compensation to negate interference from the acquired
signal.
The ESPsoft Windows™ control program
includes a unique Design-of-Experiment (DOE) interface accessing a comprehensive
suite of control and post processing functions. Scan parameters, acquisition
times, linear translation rates and self-cleaning cycles are all preprogrammable,
together with selection of automatic, semi-automatic and manual calculation
of plasma characteristics.
