BaySpec, Inc., founded in 1999 with 100% manufacturing in the USA (San Jose, California), is a vertically integrated spectral sensing company. The company designs, manufactures and markets advanced spectral instruments, including UV-VIS-NIR-SWIR spectrometers, benchtop and portable NIR/SWIR and Raman analyzers, confocal Raman microscopes, hyperspectral imagers, mass spectrometers, and OEM spectral engines and components. R&D Applications include:
Materials: Material characterization is an ideal application area for Raman spectroscopy, due to its high chemical specificity and rapid, non-contact measurement. Solid, liquid, or gaseous, nearly all materials possess a unique Raman spectral fingerprint. The technique can be readily scaled to microscopic approaches, allowing interrogation of extremely small volumes and samples, such as nanomaterials. Characterization of nanomaterials is critical to determining structural and conformational properties. Raman spectroscopy is a highly efficient technique to study the electronic properties, compositions, and mechanical stresses in these materials, all of which can manifest in Raman band shape and frequency shift.
Semiconductor: Raman spectroscopy has proven to be one of the most effective tools for characterization of semiconductor properties and for manufacturing process/quality control because materials such as Si, SiGe, InGaAs, GaAs, GaN, and graphene exhibit precise, distinct Raman bands. Applied in a microscopic approach, the Raman technique has been successfully implemented to determine microstructure composition on thin-films, strain in the multilayer device, and to identify defects across the wafer surface.
Process/Reaction: Unlike conventional UV-Vis and NIR monitoring techniques, Raman spectroscopy provides molecular specificity in real-time measurements of gas, liquid, and solid samples, both natural and synthetic. These attributes are responsible for the emerging reliance on Raman spectroscopy for a number of online process and reaction monitoring applications. Numerous sampling options, including fiber optic probes with long reach and stand-off probes for measuring inside containers and vessels make the technique adaptable to a myriad of environments and conditions.
Surface-Enhanced Raman: Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) utilizes specialized metal substrates to allow Raman signal enhancement up to 10 orders of magnitude. This phenomenon occurs when the molecules of interest are in very close proximity to the metal substrate, and is generally used for evaporated solutions or particle-surface characterization. The enhanced Raman signal with SERS has extended its applications in many fields, such as biological studies, to quantify trace substances or identify very small structures such as cell surface proteins. Intracellular SERS is also possible, via the injection of metallic nanoparticles, to study internal structures and analytes.
