7.5
Automatic Registering and Stitching of TEM/STEM Image Mosaics

Tuesday, November 5, 2013: 3:00 PM
Meeting Room 230B (San Jose McEnery Convention Center)
Dr. Chung-Ching Lin , IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
Mr. Franco Stellari , IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
Lynne Gignac , IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
Peilin Song , IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
John Bruley , IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

Summary:

Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and scanning TEM (STEM) is widely used to acquire ultra high resolution images in different research areas. For some applications, a single TEM/STEM image does not provide enough information for analysis. One example in VLSI circuit failure analysis is the tracking of long interconnection. The capability of creating a large map of high resolution images may enable significant progress in some tasks. However, stitching TEM/STEM images in semiconductor applications is difficult and existing tools are unable to provide usable stitching results for analysis. In this paper, a novel fully automated method for stitching TEM/STEM image mosaics is proposed. The proposed method allows one to reach a global optimal configuration of each image tile so that both missing and false-positive correspondences can be tolerated. The experiment results presented in this paper show that the proposed method is robust and performs well in very challenging situations.