In order to remain competitive in the rapidly growing inkjet printer industry, higher and higher demands are being made on print speed and print/image quality. As a result, the critical dimensions of thermal inkjet cartridge printheads are being constantly reduced in order to yield smaller ink droplets at higher frequencies. In order to enhance our laboratory’s ability to acquire vibrational spectral data from the increasingly small sample sizes encountered in failure analysis problems, a Raman microscope was recently added to our infrared microscopy laboratory.

The addition of a Raman microscope has increased our analysis capabilities in several ways. While infrared microscopy is diffraction limited at 10 μm, Raman microscopy can be used to study spot sizes as small as 1 μm in diameter. This has greatly expanded the range of particles which can be identified in our work. The Raman spectrum acquired of an adhesive particle in a printhead bore is shown in Fig.1.