Author_Institution :
Inst. for Phys. of Microstructures, Acad. of Sci., Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Abstract :
The development of micro- and nanoelectronics needs chemical diagnostics of structures with nanometre resolution. The progress in scanning probe microscopy, in particular, in the method of scanning Auger microscopy (SAM) (S.T. Purcell et al, Nanotechnology, vol. 12, pp. 168-172, 2001; F.A. Stevie et al, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 2476-2482, 1999), could solve this problem. The depth resolution of this method achieves by now a sub-nanometer barrier (S. Hofmann, Rep. Prog. Phys., vol. 61, pp. 827-888, 1998), but the lateral resolution amounts to no better than tens of nanometers. The goal of this work is to improve the lateral resolution of SAM by image processing using Tikhonov´s method of deconvolution that takes into account the probe transfer function.
Keywords :
Auger electron spectra; deconvolution; image resolution; scanning probe microscopy; transfer functions; SAM; Tikhonov deconvolution method; chemical diagnostics; depth resolution; images processing; lateral resolution; microelectronics; nanoelectronics; nanometre resolution; probe transfer function; scanning Auger microscopy image retrieval; scanning probe microscopy; Chemicals; Deconvolution; Image processing; Image resolution; Image retrieval; Nanoelectronics; Nanostructures; Nanotechnology; Scanning probe microscopy; Transfer functions;
