Mini PL 110

The Mini PL 110 is a miniature instrument employing a scanning monochromator with detector with gated boxcar integrator and averager with a nearly 7-decade dynamic range.

Measurement of photoluminescence (PL) spectra from wide bandgap semiconductor materials is an important characterization method and is widely accepted. These measurements are important both for research, device characterization, and manufacturing process monitoring and control.

The need for deep UV PL systems is driven by the increasing market size for wide bandgap semiconductors driven by the need for high power and high temperature devices, deep UV LEDs, and solar blind detectors.

The Mini PL 110 was designed originally for mapping wide bandgap semiconductors. The instrument comes with a laser emitting 248nm (5.0 eV)  or 224nm (5.5 eV) photons for use with AlGaN and other similar semiconductor materials. It also includes a monochromator, detector, optics and electronics operated with a separate notebook computer.

This instrument has options for LN2 and LHe sample cooling stages as well as motorized XY mapping stages with submicron resolution.

In addition to PL spectra, the Mini PL 110 can also be used for Raman analysis with a 35 cm^-1 resolution. However, the Mini PL 110 uses a monochromator and not a spectrograph. The spectrum is generated by detecting each spectral increment separately and sequentially, unlike a spectrograph, which detects the entire spectrum at once.

Before taking a spectrum, you can select the spectral step size between spectral increments and change the number of laser pulses which are averaged at each spectral increment to obtain the desired signal to noise ratio (SNR).   Click here for a further discussion of the Mini PL 110 detection system.

When using the Mini PL 110 system it is beneficial to limit the spectral range to only the region of interest, use the widest spectral step size possible and use the smallest number of laser pulses possible since these factors can dramatically affect the time it takes to obtain a spectrum.

If you need to take complete Raman spectra and/or need higher resolution, then we recommend our Raman PL 200, which is a spectrograph based system including a 3 stage cooled CCD detector. It can quickly generate full Raman spectra at much higher resolution.