plasma cleaning machine / for the electronics industry / immersion

Tabletop plasma cleaner for contamination removal on SEM and TEM samples

Tergeo-EM plasma cleaner is a special edition of Tergeo series plasma cleaner designed for SEM/TEM sample cleaning application. It replaces the quartz window in standard Tergeo plasma cleaner with a stainless steel adapter that can accept TEM sample rods from different TEM vendors. Adapters for TEM sample rods from different vendors can be easily exchanged. Pin-mount SEM sample holders can be placed on the internal quartz plate for cleaning.

Applications:
Most SEM users are familiar with the dark burn mark in SEM images. Those dark scan marks are e-beam induced hydrocarbon deposition. Due to low secondary electron yield for carbon element, hydrocarbon coated surface is usually much darker than clean surfaces, especially for SE (secondary electron) imaging at relatively low landing energy, such as 1000eV. Hydrocarbon contaminations on sample surface can significantly reduce the materials contrast at low landing energy, degrade image resolutions for high-resolution FE-SEM. To take advantage of high resolution capability on FE-SEM, it's important to remove the hydrocarbon contamination from the sample surface.