Functional surfaces, mostly coated, are of big importance in almost all industrial branches. Application areas are e.g. thermal insulation, corrosion protection, wear protection, decorative and optical coatings and optoelectronic and microelectronic applications. Consequently, quality assurance in surface technology requires reliable testing and analysis procedures from the upper micrometer to the lower nanometer range and the corresponding reference materials. Layer thickness, surface and interface roughness, microstructural features (texture, grain size, phase-composition), stoichiometry and density have to be considered in terms of vertical and lateral resolution and with respect to the uncertainty of measurement. Reference coatings and films recently developed, qualified or provided by BAM are single and multi-layers such as DLC coatings, TiN-, TiC-, VN-, VC- single, and Ti/Al-, TiO{sub}2/SiO{sub}(2-),CrAlN/CrN- multi-layers. They are applied in mechanical property testing (e.g. scratch test) and depth profiling (e.g. for evaluation of depth resolution of GD-OES, AES, SIMS, SNMS). A cross-section of a GaAs/GaAlAs/InAs multilayer stack provides a nano-scaled strip pattern for the calibration of length scale and the evaluation of the lateral resolution of SEM, AES, XPS and SIMS. Within this paper, an overview is provided on recent and future activities at BAM in the emerging field of reference coatings. This comprises information on the preparation and the application of such reference materials and the discussion of both destructive (REM, TEM) and non-destructive evaluation and certification techniques by means of Grazing Incidence X-Ray Diffraction (GIXRD), Spectroscopic Ellipsometry (SE) and Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW).
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