High speed and Highly Accurate Tip-Scanning Atomic Force Microscope

A novel high speed and highly accurate tip scanning AFM (TS-AFM) head which uses a flexure guided xy and z scanning system has been developed. Moreover, additional components including a coarse z-stage, an optical microscope with a motorized focus stage and structural frames are also developed to evaluate the feasibility for application for large samples for example, Liquid Crystal Displays and wafers. As experiments, performances of AFM components are eva­luated in view point of the travel range, the resolution, the resonance and so on. Especially, crosstalk effects among axes of fine scanners are investigated thoroughly. The vertical out-of-plane motion of the xy-scanner is less than 1 nm. Performances of AFM images are in­vestigated via various standard samples. Here, crosstalk effects among axes of fine scanners are investigated via NC-AFM images. Also, high speed AFM images up to 5 Hz are realized for the 2D standard grating and compared with the commercial AFM. The TS-AFM is sufficiently accurate for measuring the small feature sample and expected to be widely used in the nano-resolution industrial measurement appli­cations especially for large LCDs and wafer samples.