Properties and performance of an engineering product often strongly depend on the outmost layers of its surface.  Be it a coating layer of completely different type of material from the underlying substrate, or layers where the chemical composition differs from the underlying substrate, the knowledge of the chemical or elemental composition and the thickness of such surface layers are of vital importance for many industrial applications.  

EMSL’s state-of-the-art pulsed RF glow-discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GD-OES) is a powerful tool that can be used to analyze single or multi layers on conductive metallic materials, semiconducting materials, as well as non-conductive inorganic or organic materials.   In addition to GD-OES, EMSL can also analyze the depth profiles using other techniques such as Auger spectroscopy and SEM/EDX cross-sectional analysis.