Why you should add Feature analysis to your SEM

When analysing samples in the SEM, we are often looking to understand more than what we can see in a single field of view. This means that we need to make sure that we analyse the entirety of a sample to ensure we don’t miss anything. Unfortunately, characterising a whole sample can be a time consuming activity if done manually as, when working at the magnifications that an SEM is capable of, even a sample a few millimetres across can seem huge. In order to understand our samples, what we need is an approach that can find what is interesting to us while using our time as efficiently as possible – and that approach, Feature analysis, is the subject of this tutorial.

Feature analysis automates the process of choosing what in a sample to analyse, performing that analysis and interpreting the results using a classification scheme. It is a process which is fast to set up and which can run unattended – making efficient use both of analytical time on the SEM and your time. There are many reasons for adding Feature analysis capability to your analytical system. Perhaps you need to search for something rare – maybe you are searching for something valuable that you hope is there or for a particularly problematic particle that you need to check isn’t there. Or perhaps you need to understand the relative proportions of different parts of your samples. Or maybe you need to understand particle or grain morphologies and how they relate to composition. By adding Feature analysis to your SEM based analytical capability you will be ready to go as soon as the need arises.

You will learn:

• About the wide range of applications that can be addressed by particle analysis
• How AZtecFeature combines speed with flexibility to enable analyses tailored to your needs
• How the latest generation of hardware combines with advanced algorithms to ensure that you get the right results at the highest levels of throughput