Specimen Preparation for Scanning Electron Microscope Using a Converted Sample Stage

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study introduces metal coating as an effective sample preparation method to remove charge-up caused by the shadow effect during field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) analysis of dynamic structured samples. During a FE-SEM analysis, charge-up occurs when the primary electrons (input electrons) that scan the specimens are not equal to the output electrons (secondary electrons, backscattered electrons, auger electrons, etc.) generated from the specimens. To remove charge-up, a metal layer of Pt, Au or Pd is applied on the surface of the sample. However, in some cases, charge-up still occurs due to the shadow effect. This study developed a coating method that effectively removes charge-up. By creating a converted sample stage capable of simultaneous tilt and rotation, the shadow effect was successfully removed, and image data without charge-up were obtained.