Design of Micro-scale Electrostatic Lens for Miniature Scanning Electron Microscope

It is a modern trend towards small sizes in the scanning electron microscope (SEM) development in near future. In this research, we propose and design a miniature SEM system composed of an electron gun and an electrostatic lens in micro-scale. In this design, we can focus the electron beam without magnetic lens to reduce the volume of the instrument. In this way, we can make the SEM more portable and been widely used. Future more, we will turn this micro-scale SEM to a multi-beam SEM by integrating with the microarray field-emission sources. By stitching the parallel-captured images to one whole-field image we can reduce the scanning time effectively, especially in a large-sample examination. If we install an automated diamond knife to slice samples in the multi-beam SEM, we can construct the three-dimensional structures of huge specimens. It will be powerful in many application fields, for example, the research in biology and neuroscience.