In April 2007, Cerium Labs completed upgrades to our Philips/FEI CM300, a field emission scanning transmission electron microscope (FEG-STEM). The upgrades include installation of a Fishione HAADF STEM detector, FEI ES-Vision STEM control suite, and Thermo-Noran System Six EDXS acquisition/analysis suites. These updates combined with our Gatan GIF-2002 PEELS spectrometer already in use enable the instrument to now perform Hyperspectral 4-D analysis.

These upgrades increase our analysis capabilities into three primary areas:

• Z-contrast (atomic mass) dark field imaging, especially suited for analysis on Cu-Ta film stacks used in semiconductor device manufacturing.
• Simultaneous acquisition and processing of STEM spatial signals (X and Y dimensions), STEM-EDXS signals (third dimension) and STEM-PEELS (fourth dimension) signals.
• Active drift correction allowing large field of view or high resolution (spatial or energy) spectral images and profiles.

From these spectral images and profiles, we can generate line scans or elemental maps offline based on any element that gives a signal in either the PEEL spectra or the EDX spectra.