Improving Acquisition Time in Scanning Microwave Microscopy by Undersampling the Scan Area

Abstract

Scanning Microwave Microscopy (SMM) is a tool with high potential to analyze and characterize nanomaterials. A disadvantage of this technique is the scanning speed when using a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) compared to other Scanning Probe Microscopy methods that already have fast approaches. With this paper we present a method to speed up the SMM scan without changing the components of the measurement setup. All of this is done by software, the proposed method undersamples the device under test and calculates the missing pixels afterwards with different inpainting methods. This is achieved through a custom made electronics board which can generate arbitrary trajectories and a robotic software framework, which provides the algorithms for controlling and reconstructing the measured data.