Recent advances in surface and thin film analysis methods for application to packaging problems

After a short summary of the "classical" surface analysis methods such as XPS, AES, SIMS, and RBS, a few recent advances in the field of surface and thin film analysis are described that are of relevance for analysis of problems related to packaging technologies. These methods include: chemical state depth profiling with AES, multi-element depth profiling with TOF-SIMS, and three different analytical methods for the sensitive chemical analysis of organic surface contaminations: thermal desorption-gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (TD-GC/MS), ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), and TOF-SIMS.