The influence of environment temperature on SEM image quality

As the structure dimension goes down to the nano-scale, it often requires a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to provide image magnification up to 100 000 x. However, SEM images at such a high magnification usually suffer from high resolution value and low signal-to-noise ratio, which results in low quality of the SEM image. In this paper, the quality of the SEM image is improved by optimizing the environment temperature. The experimental results indicate that at 100 000 x, the quality of the SEM image is influenced by the environment temperature, whereas at 50 000 x it is not. At 100 000 x the best SEM image quality can be achieved from the environment temperature ranging 292 from 294 K, and the SEM image quality evaluated by the double stimulus continuous quality scale method can increase from grade 1 to grade 5. It is expected that this image quality improving method can be used in routine measurements with ordinary SEMs to get high quality images by optimizing the environment temperature.