Evaluation, Revision and Application of the Nbs Stylus/Computer System for the Measurement of Surface Roughness

Abstract : This report describes in detail the hardware and software used at NBS to implement on a stylus instrument/minicomputer system the process of calibrating the system with an interferometrically measured step and the calculation of important characterizations of surface profiles. The characterizations of a profile which may be calculated include the arithmetic average value, the mean square value, the amplitude density function, the autocorrelation function and the average wavelength. The report also includes a statistical evaluation, using empirical and analytical techniques, of the calibration procedure's long term stability.