Electric fields in Scanning Electron Microscopy simulations

Abstract

The electric field distribution and charging effects in Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) were studied by extending a Monte-Carlo based SEM simulator by a fast and accurate multigrid (MG) based 3D electric field solver. The main focus is on enabling short simulation times with maintaining sufficient accuracy, so that SEM simulation can be used in practical applications. The implementation demonstrates a gain in computation speed, when compared to a Gauss-Seidel based reference solver is roughly factor of 40, with negligible differences in the result (~10−6 𝑉). In addition, the simulations were compared with experimental SEM measurements using also complex 3D sample, showing that i) the modelling of e-fields improves the simulation accuracy, and ii) multigrid method provide a significant benefit in terms of simulation time.