Design of a multiple-electron-beam imaging technique for surface inspection

Abstract

This article presents a multiple-electron-beam imaging technique, which is able to simultaneously process images from multiple scanning sources. The proposal is based on the detection of wide-angle BSEs, whose spectrum is predicted to be largely confined to a sharp elastic peak at the primary electron beam energy, which remains unaltered even if the incident beam is tilted. When electron sources of different energies are used to illuminate the sample, the energy of wide-angle BSEs will be confined close to their respective primary beam energies. The wide-angle scattered electrons are then subsequently energy filtered to obtain separate images, which are formed by parallel energy mode acquisition at the detector plane. © 2009 American Vacuum Society.