For makers of computers, disk drives and other sophisticated technologies, a guiding principle is that the smoother the surfaces of chips and other components, the better these devices and the products, themselves, will function. So, some manufacturers might be surprised to learn that a fast and increasingly popular method for measuring surface texture can yield misleading results. As reported at recent conferences and in an upcoming issue of Applied Optics,* a team of NIST researchers has found that roughness measurements made with white-light interferometric microscopes, introduced in the early 1990s, differed by as much as 80 percent from those obtained with two other surface-profiling methods.
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