All materials used for and involved in manufacturing processes must be checked for quality. Optical microscopy techniques are commonly used to look at surfaces for imperfections, cleanliness, coating quality or contaminants (such as particles), and material features such as metallic grain size, coating thickness, annealing or sintering quality, or material uniformity. Optical inspection and optical microscopy have been used successfully for many years and are versatile and easy-to-use. However, optical microscopy has technical limitations.
Today's modern manufacturing processes and techniques require more precise tolerances in order to meet product specifications and reduce production costs. Scanning electron microscopy has evolved to meet these new requirements.
Today, any sample, regardless of its condition or cleanliness, moisture content, corrosive state, chemistry or conductance, can be immediately imaged under virtually any environmental condition. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) can analyze materials for information about topography, chemical composition, contamination, inclusions, metal phases, grain size, distribution and orientation, coating quality, thickness, or chemistry, and feature sizes—all at resolutions thousands of times higher and with far greater depth of field than is possible with optical microscopy.
FEI's Quanta family, including the Quanta Inspect and the Quanta 200 3D DualBeam, can accommodate multiple samples and imaging requirements for industrial process control labs, materials science labs and life science labs.