Trying Auto Slice & View, also Cross sections

There are also some pictures from practice of milling and depositioning of Platinum. The material is a plain Si-chip with one micron of Si-oxide.

Here are some animations.

Here a thin trench has been milled at the lower part of the picture.
Then the same milling pattern (a thin rectangle) has been used to deposit about 0.5 µm of platinum at the center of the image.
On top of that a very thin layer of platinum (about 0.02 µm) has been deposited over a larger rectangular area.

The irregular "splatter"-like structure is remnants from a Si-particle that was moved away by the bombardment of the ion beam during the start of this session.

Same picture with some measures.

Here is the big rectangular area deposited with 0.1 µm of Platinum nominally, i.e. Z-value set in software. Ion-beam: 30 kV, 10 pA, area = 5.6 × 3.5 µm, time 6 min. 40 s.

Regular Cross Section

Regular Cross Section near a Si-fragment. Note shading effect on milling at lower left corner of milled rectangle. SEM-image at 52° tilt.

Same area imaged with ion-beam, giving a top-side view.

Here the same sample has been rotated 90° and tilted again to the standard 52° (perpendicular to the ion-beam). The idea is to do cross-sections across the Platinum-"ridge".
Please note the drift present during the deposition of the large area of 0.1 µm Platinum, the edges are slanting to the left.

Here is a first attempt to make a "Cleaning Cross Section". The parameters for it was not good, it was too short along the vertical direction.

Too short Cleaning Cross Section.

Here is a longer Cleaning Cross Section, about one micron vertical. Note the cross section through the trench filled with deposited Platinum at the left part of the cross-section.

Cleaning Cross Section, note trench filled with platinum to the left and that the "ridge" to the right is not homogeneous.

Here is after an ASV-session has been completed. The slice depth was only 0.1 µm, only the top has been sliced through. This small slice depth was chosen to collect the series quickly, and is not representative for a proper cross section series.

Final picture of ASV session.

Top side view taken with ion-beam imaging.

Platinum deposition using e-beam, quick test

Here a second trial was done at a longer time, although there is not much difference. Still the same thin strips of deposited material. It could be that the smaller width of the e-beam was not taken into account, i.e. same step size was used as when depositing with the ion-beam.
Note that these depositions are done at 52° tilt.

Here the sample is at zero tilt, and a third trial with e-beam depositioning was done. Here something is seriously wrong, probably focus was bad during deposition, there is only a very hazy area indicating this deposit, immediately below the text.
Note the long contamination dots that can be seen from the side in the left part of the picture. They must have been built during e-beam imaging when tilt was 52°.

Same area imaged at 52° tilt, note that the long pillars now appear as dots, they are seen head on.

Comparison ion-imaging at smallest apertures

The image area is inside a previously made ASV-session, there are a lot of structures of different heights.

My conclusion is that the 1 pA image is slightly sharper despite that it was not possible to do any optimization with stigmation and focus. However this is uncertain due to more wear of the area during the optimization before collecting the image for the 10 pA aperture.

1 pA ion beam aperture, very difficult to see nay difference when changing stigmation and focus, seems to make very little difference. At this small aperture depth-of-focus is very large explaining why very little happens when changing the focus.

10 pA ion beam aperture, here it was possible to optimize the image, both regarding stigmation and focus.