Line profile reconstruction from simultaneously recorded secondary and backscattered electron signals.

We propose a reconstruction method of surface morphology using a combination of secondary and back-scattered electron signals from the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Compared with multiple-detector methods, the proposed system requires only conventional secondary and backscattered electron detectors for a line profile reconstruction in one direction. This method is an application of genetic algorithms to the measurement of surface morphology in SEM. We use the chi-square distribution of the reconstruction error as the objective function within a scheme to minimize the number of vertices in the reconstructed surface profile. (The reconstruction error is the relative difference between the calculated and experimental data.) To evaluate the efficacy of our method, a surface profile is successfully reconstructed from a pair of line scans across the center of a latex particle.