Abstract
The adhesion of evaporated or sputtered thin films to substrates is one of the most important characterising parameters in their fabrication. It is a conventional method to scratch the films using a stylus and evaluate the shearing stress, which is proportional to the energy of adhesion. For the evaluation it is necessary to determine the so-called critical load and the profile of the scratch.The aim during this experimental work was to find a method to evaluate the scratch profile from the X-ray-line profile and SEM pictures. From SEM pictures, the lateral dimensions and surface morphology of the scratches were studied. The thickness was also studied from X-ray-line profiles.In this paper the thickness profile measuring method and the conclusion for the scratch method are discussed.