Bands in SEM Images

Automated Interpretation of SEM Images

An important part of quality control in the fabrication of integrated circuit wafers involves making three-dimen sional measurements of the wafer’s surface topography. We describe a method for obtaining a dense depth map of the wafer surface from a single Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) image. The depth map gives a complete description of the surface topography, allowing the easy calculation...

Curvelet Based Offline Analysis of SEM Images

Manual offline analysis, of a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image, is a time consuming process and requires continuous human intervention and efforts. This paper presents an image processing based method for automated offline analyses of SEM images. To this end, our strategy relies on a two-stage process, viz. texture analysis and quantification. The method involves a preprocessing step, a...

Surface Reconstruction From AFM and SEM Images

Sparsity-Based Super Resolution for SEM Images

The scanning electron microscope (SEM) is an electron microscope that produces an image of a sample by scanning it with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with the atoms in the sample, which emit secondary electrons that contain information about the surface topography and composition. The sample is scanned by the electron beam point by point, until an image of the surface is f...

Quality Estimation of SEM Wafer Images

This paper describes a practical method for image quality estimation. In particular, this method applies to SEM images of VLSI wafers. Wafers are extremely sensitive to electron charging, since they may contain nonconducting materials. This forces utilization of low energy, low-current electron beams and short viewing times. The images generated under these SEM settings are noisy. An automatic ...