hey everyone I
thought I'd talk about
some of the upgrades I've been making to
my scanning electron microscope in the
past few weeks but first I want to give
a big thanks to the FEI company for
helping me out with this new turbo
molecular pump and also a Pirani vacuum
gauge that i've been using on my
sputtering setup so this equipment is
super helpful to me and I am very
grateful so here's a quick recap of how
the scanning electron microscope column
works at the top we've got an electron
gun and this sprays out a stream of
electrons that are expanding in a fan
and the reason that the beam expands is
because the electrons are like charged
and they naturally repel each other so
even if you had a perfectly collimated
beam of electrons it would actually
spread out all by itself in this case
the electron gun itself forms a slight
lens an electron lens so the electrons
shoot off in a cone pattern and in this
particular setup the the spot at the
bottom is about you know 2 or 3
centimeters in diameter if there were no
optics in the column at all instead what
we want to do for electron microscopy is
to actually focus the beam down to a
very tight point when it hits the sample
at the bottom and so to do that we make
this column long because the longer the
column is the easier our job is in using
electron optics to focus this thing down
it's the same reason that telescopes and
microscopes are physically long it's
just because moving those photons or
electrons like take some space and what
we do is we add a lens this was called a
condenser lens and it takes the beam
that we've generated from this electron
gun and focuses it down again so there's
sort of a crossover point here just like
you'd have a crossover point with a
magnifying glass the light sort of
crosses over forms a focus and then
starts expanding again and we do that so
that we can make the most parallel beam
of electrons down here and we do this
with a combination of these electron
lenses and pin holes so you can see on
the diagram here there's a pinhole going
into this first lens and then a pinhole
down here and the whole purpose of this
whole setup here is just to get a very
collimated thin beam of electrons here
so the next step is to scan this very
thin collimated beam of electrons across
our sample so this way we can sort of
build up an image by scanning the sample
in a raster pattern basically filling up
the image pixel by pixel and we have a
couple options we could either use a
magnetic field to move those electrons
or we could use an electric field now
generally most modern electron
microscopes use a magnetic field because
you can get a stronger magnetic field
more easily so you can make the whole
column more compact and allow to do more
by by concentrating magnetic field
however the problem with that is that
you need to make iron pole pieces and
the shape is very sensitive to how the
you know the shape affects how it
operates in a very critical way so an
easier solution that isn't as quite as
high performance is to use electrostatic
deflection and it's easier because all
we need is a couple of plates just a
plate on either side of the electron
beam and then we just put a voltage
across those two plates and the electron
beam will be deflected as it goes
through the electric field formed by
those two plates and so the video today
I'm going to talk about the
amplification or the driver that I made
that drives the voltage on these
deflection plates and then after we've
deflected the beam there's a final
focusing lens that will take this
collimated you know very thin but
colonnades beam of electrons actually
focus it down to a point right on to the
surface of the thing that we want to
image I don't have the lens installed
right now but it would go right below
these deflection plates so originally I
was using a disassembled oscilloscope to
generate the voltages that I need on
these deflection plates to move the
electron beam around and this worked out
pretty well because the oscilloscope
already has amplifiers to amplify a
small input signal could only be like a
volt or even less and amplify that all
the way up to the hundreds of volts that
we need to move the electron beam around
and conveniently oscilloscopes already
have an electrostatic cathode ray tube
that's that's how they say old analog
scopes worked and so all I had to do is
unhook the deflection plates in the CRT
and hook the scope circuit up to the
deflection plates in my electron
microscope so it's sort of a really low
work pretty high performance solution
however I did end up running into
problems the voltage available was only
about I think 150 or 200 volts which
wasn't quite enough so I couldn't scan a
very big area because the voltages were
just not high enough to move that
electron beam enough and the offsets or
the available range of offsets was
limited because of this and that was the
sort of the biggest problem so I wanted
to have a circuit that I would be a
little bit more adaptable to what I was
doing and also mainly just use a higher
voltage and I found this circuit made by
rhe head Wahby
I hope in getting your name correct at
web de fête org and this guy builds
Silla scope clocks and similar things
and also needed a deflection circuit to
drive CRTs so I've modified his circuit
a little bit but the main gist of it is
that it's a single ended to differential
amplifier so we put our positive voltage
across the top here and then we have
common emitter single transistor
amplifiers and they're coupled together
with this pot here so as we put us an
input signal here let's say is 0 to 5
volts these amplifiers this was
non-inverting and this is inverting and
so what we have up here
are two signals that are out of phase
with each other and that's good because
that means the average voltage between
these two output lines is always going
to be about the same so that as one goes
up the other goes down and vice-versa
but they always average out to about the
same if they didn't if there was a
common mode change where if the average
voltage did actually change then these
deflection plates would start working
like a lens but unfortunately they only
exist the deflection plates are only in
one axis and so what we'd have is a lens
that only functions in one axis and not
the other and that would cause a
stigmatism which is basically with the
beam becomes sort of oval shaped instead
of round now if you can control that
that's actually a good thing because we
can correct for a stigmatism that's
caused
by other things in the system it can
actually make it astigmatism corrector
however if we don't have control over it
then you might get a stigmatism and you
know you can't correct for it this
circuit will introduce a slight amount
of common mode voltage changing and you
can't actually control it that easily
but I'm working on some tweaks that will
fix that the transistors are ztx 458
which are a good high voltage transistor
that can take up to about 400 volts and
also have pretty good gain I think the
gain is about 200 on these and so I've
set the circuit up with a 350 volt rail
here and I'm using 470 K ohm pull-up
resistors here so it's a basic common
emitter amplifier where if we put some
current into the transistor it will pull
down on this resistor here and lower the
voltage here so when the transistors are
not conducting anything the voltage on
these lines is very close to the rail
and when the transistor is fully
conducting then the voltage is very
close to ground although it's a little
bit off because of the emitter resistor
there originally the circuit had an
additional transistor in here so that he
could use a much higher supply rail
since I don't have that set up on my
circuit here I just took out that
transistor and then lowered the supply
voltage down to about 350 volts this pot
controls the offset basically where the
scanning is going to happen it basically
just moves the whole center point of
this amplifier and this pot controls the
gain so if this is a low value then the
coupling between these two amplifiers is
very tight and you'll get a very high
gain so I soldered the circuit together
on some vector board and added an op-amp
just to provide like a voltage follower
on the input so the input impedance to
this amplifier is relatively low and I
wanted to drive it from a PWM output
which is going to have a relatively high
output impedance so the op-amp fixes
that problem I'm using an old rackmount
high voltage supply for the 350 volt
rail and the current draw in sort of a
worst-case scenario would be
two or three milliamps okay let's fire
it up the first step is to turn on the
roughing vacuum pump and you'll actually
be able to see the blades of the turbo
pump turning just from the air being
drawn through it
okay so after about five or ten minutes
the thermocouple gauge is showing
between 500 and a thousand
militar and I'm going to switch on the
turbo pump and the readout here is a
zero to ten scale that indicates the
speed of the turbo pump so this this
pump has a built-in controller and you
basically just tell it to go on and it
will ramp up the speed automatically so
when the reading is 10 10 volts on that
meter the speed is about 70,000 rpm and
as you can see look how fast the gauge
declines the turbo pump is able to start
pumping from the 500 militar range and
take it all the way down to high vacuum
in sort of one swoop
okay so we've been pumping for about 10
or 20 minutes and we're down to about 5
times 10 to the -5 millibar so now we'll
move over to the control side and turn
on the filament and then also turn on
the high voltage supply so I've got a
bit of phosphor coated glass in there
taken from an oscilloscope CRT and we
can see that when the power comes on
there's now a tiny little green spot
where the electron beam is hitting the
phosphor so the beam has been expanded
and collimated by that series of lenses
and pinholes that I talked about but
there's currently no focus and no
deflection happening however if I turn
on the deflection amplifier we can see a
little Christmas tree so I borrowed this
code from John DeCristofaro known as
John Jr who came up with this cool
little hack a few years ago and he's
using an Arduino to generate PWM and
then the PWM is smoothed out into analog
voltages so you can feed this into your
XY mode on the oscilloscope and have a
nice little Christmas tree graphic there
so I can use the control pots in the
amplifier to move this image around and
you can see that when we get close to
one of the extremes it will start
bunching up because the deflection
plates have sort of run out of the
ability to actually move the electron
beam but as you can see the range is
actually pretty good and of course we
also have control over the scale
here's a more typical raster scan
pattern so this is covering a square
area and it's being scanned very slowly
so you can see the movement of the beam
here's a back and forth raster scan with
digital acquisition it doesn't make
sense to return the beam all the way to
one side and so here we're just scanning
back and forth and covering a whole
rectangle that way and here we are going
much faster so now you can see the area
that it's actually tracing out and of
course we could do the back and forth in
the y-direction as well instead of
returning to one edge like it is now
unfortunately the pedo boom out but from
the Arduino is not even close to fast
enough to get a real-time image out of
this least I don't think and so I think
what I'm going to have to do is
implement the microcontroller with a
true DAC to get the bandwidth into
accuracy that I want out of this but
that'll be a topic for a future video ok
see you next time
byeearn money online without investment for students, earn money by clicking ads, earn money online without investment, online earn money website, online jobs to earn money, best online income site, top 10 online money earning sites, easy income online, easy online earning, earn money online from home, make money online legit, earn money online free fast and easy, online earning websites list, genuine online money earning sites, online work to earn money, online surveys to earn money, earn money through internet, best online income, earn money online data entry, easy ways to make money online, best online earning websites, top websites to earn money, online typing jobs for students to earn money, earn skrill money online, earn skrill money, best way to earn money from home, make instant money online absolutely free, trusted online money making sites, online income site, best online earning, money online, earn money from home, earn dollars online, earn money online, earn money online 2019, earn money online by typing pages, earn money online daily, online work at home and earn money, online earning,
No comments:
Post a Comment