Low energy microcolumn for large field view inspection

Since the development of microcolumn system, it attracted much attention because multiple microcolumns can be assembled into arrayed form, which is expected to generate multiple electron beams and overcome the disadvantage of electron beam inspection equipments, low throughput. However, it is not easy to apply a microcolumn to the practical inspection or testing equipment since its scanning area is too small. Even if the arrayed operation using multiple microcolumns can overcome this limit, it requires complicated supporting systems and related technologies to operate a number of microcolumns simultaneously. Therefore, we tried to modify microcolumn design itself so that it can have a large field of view. In this work, two kinds of modified columns will be suggested and the preliminary results showing their performance of scanning large area will be discussed.