TESCAN announces Large Volume Workflow to improve time-to-result and increase throughput for Plasma FIB sample processing

In semiconductor, automotive, and aerospace industries and their related research fields, there is an increasing need for large volume material removal to reach regions of interest faster for failure and defect root-cause analyses. Plasma FIB has been able to serve accelerated material removal rates for sub-mm spatial dimensions. However, as industry and research move to larger sample dimensions and more complex device structures, plasma FIB milling alone may be challenged to achieve the speed required to efficiently access deeply buried features of interest. TESCAN’s Large Volume Workflow harnesses the natural synergies of Plasma FIB-SEM and a stand-alone laser tool to support rapid, cubic-millimeter-scale material removal for sample preparation and further analysis.

Laser ablation significantly improves time-to-result for large volume milling or rapid access to deeply buried regions of interest. Implementing laser ablation as a stand-alone tool allows labs to not only better leverage the advantages provided by their plasma FIB instrument for sample preparation and analysis, but also better feed the pipeline for other failure analysis instruments. The laser tool can be dedicated to bulk material removal operations which frees the plasma FIB for the final sample processing steps, including targeted material removal, sample thinning or cross-section polishing. Moreover, it protects the FIB-SEM from extensive contamination.

TESCAN’s Large Volume Workflow reduces both time-to-sample and the cost-per-sample by using each of the technologies for the specific tasks to which they are best suited. TESCAN’s laser ablation tool solution supports TESCAN SOLARIS X and TESCAN AMBER X instruments by handling the bulk milling operations, as well as supporting other FIB or analytical instruments that would benefit from the thousands of times faster laser ablation technique for sample processing.  

Learn more about TESCAN Large Volume Workflow here.

Watch the webinar here.