Accelerating Electron Microscopy Spectroscopy and 4D Imaging with Compressed Sensing
Accelerating Electron Microscopy Spectroscopy and 4D Imaging with Compressed Sensing
Wednesday, October 7, 2026: 12:00 AM
Summary:
Characterization of materials at the nanoscale is a crucial component of semiconductor device manufacturing and an integral part of failure analysis. Characterization methods such as energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDX) are an everyday technique where analyses can typically take tens of minutes and sometimes hours. For more powerful analysis, four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) is used. Both of these techniques are far slower than regular imaging, limiting feasible application of these techniques. Finding methods to speed up data acquisition for these techniques is crucial for saving time and money, getting to root causes and improving yields. Presented here is a computational imaging technique that can speed up these techniques by factors of 10x. Compressed sensing methods, namely dictionary learning and sparse sampling, are presented to alleviate issues associated with long acquisition times.
Characterization of materials at the nanoscale is a crucial component of semiconductor device manufacturing and an integral part of failure analysis. Characterization methods such as energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDX) are an everyday technique where analyses can typically take tens of minutes and sometimes hours. For more powerful analysis, four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) is used. Both of these techniques are far slower than regular imaging, limiting feasible application of these techniques. Finding methods to speed up data acquisition for these techniques is crucial for saving time and money, getting to root causes and improving yields. Presented here is a computational imaging technique that can speed up these techniques by factors of 10x. Compressed sensing methods, namely dictionary learning and sparse sampling, are presented to alleviate issues associated with long acquisition times.