The Difficult Birth of the Scanning Electron Microscope

have mercy on my sleep schedule

The Cambridge Museum of Technology has a exhibition on the history of Cambridge Instruments, including an early SEM

Once I attended a local college's open house, and one of the things on offer was a web interface to operate an electron microscope, so that the user didn't need (1) to be on-site and (2) lots of technical training. After the demo was over, I approached the presenters and asked if I could play with it a bit. They seemed happy to let me, a total layman, have at it. The subject in the chamber was a housefly. I could pick anyplace on it and keep zooming in and finding more and more detailed structures to marvel at. I swear I could have sat there and poked around on that fly all day. The kicker is that they explained that the fly, in order to show up properly on the scope, had been plated in silver, and that this is standard practice for biological samples. I learned that day that there are such things as silver-plated houseflies in the world.

This was a wonderful story. As a kid in the 60s I spent hours running around the Cambridge Instrument Company where my father worked as a technician on these microscopes.

This struck me as interesting; "The student is judged on the excellence of their work rather than the end result.", this seems to me a good approach to apply to many endeavours.

I worked at the Schlumberger research lab supporting Fairchild and their CAD companies. One of them was Sentry and they produced a debugging station for chip design. Due to my background in visual inspection, I became peripherally involved, but I remember that the model number had the number 5000, perhaps SEM-5000? The year is probably 1985-86. Thank you for a trip down memory lane.

Small typo @09:23; Vernon Cosslett's life was from 1908 ~ 1990. Not 1980, that would be a tremendous achievement IMHO.

There are many different varieties of scanning electron microscopes. Some models are quite simple in design. But the units that are used to non-destructively image powered integrated circuits require very special electron optics, such that high resolution is maintained while the energy of the electrons is kept as low as possible, to minimize their influence on the semiconductor devices. This is the opposite to the more typical high resolution microscopes, where the resolution is bought by cranking the energy of the electrons up -- in some TEMs, to millions of electron-volts.

I own a Cambridge Instruments Stereoscan 260 as shown in the picture at 19:10. Me and a couple of friends bought it on an auction from Stockholm university. Sadly we only managed to produce a couple of images before it failed. It turned out to be in very poor condition. I am still trying to bring it back to life and replacing all of the electronics with modern components. I have a couple of videos of it on my channel. The SEM is a very interesting collection of engineering marvels, precision electronics and plumbing. Thank you for a great video!

Cambridge instrument formed later together with Leica as LEO (Leica electron optics) then Zeiss joined. Then LEO was aquired completely by Zeiss and Leica stopped building EM but still producing accessories for sample preparation. Although arch rivalries in optical microscope, Leica and Zeiss still cooperate when providing solutions for EM customers. Currently Zeiss is still producing the SEM in a small town close to Cambridge.

I actually have a Cambridge Stereoscan 200 sitting in a room of my house. Haven't had a chance to hook it back up since I moved, but hope to get it back up and working again.

Great video. I work at Zeiss on the SEMs here. Your video made me feel proud that I'm here, continuing the legacy of Oatley et al.

After 20 years in the industry, there isn’t another single tool I used more often in evaluating process development and yield improvement. The SEM, EDX and FIB combination was used on everything. There are other technologies that were completely required for development of one node or another, but the sem enabled every node improvement due to impoverishment in development cycle time. A SEM in fab allows adjustments on the fly to DOE’s and cross sectional SEM images which took time in hours to days were more of a secondary confirmation that changes or improvements were ready to send forward to electrical evaluation in days or months.

I remember a Philips ad in Scientific American with an image take n by an SEM that could work at ambient atmospheric pressure, no need for a vacuum. The ad showed an ant carrying a memory chip, the resolution was high enough to see the details on the chip. It may seem not a very high amplification but working at atmospheric pressure was amazing and working fast enough to take an image of a living samples was also amazing. I don't know if it was a commercial product or a proof of concept, but the ad was good enough that I remember it 40 years later. I think I still have the magazine. It was not those colored images you see on Internet it was a grayscale one and the chip was visibly a DRAM (only regular features).

In nearly fifty years of watching documentaries, I have never seen a hint of the background of scanning electron microscopes. Excellent topic! I now expect a follow-up covering the scanning tunneling microscope. :D

Another fantastic, well researched story. In the future, when they're smaller and cheaper - I look forward to having my own SEM on my desk!

My last job was at a solar-cell company where I was in charge of laser processes. I was allowed to use the company's SEM to look at the various cuts and blind holes and surface changes that the lasers could make. The SEM was a great diagnostic and just a lot of fun to use.

This channel is my fountain of geek knowledge. Love it. I could watch your videos all day if I didn’t have to work. Absolutely brilliant.

My parents knew Manfred von Ardenne and visited his laboratory "auf dem Weißen Hirsch" - "on the white deer" - because of my dads and moms work in electronics and medicine respectively. I guess out of curiosity and maybe for him to work there. Dad worked on pace makers somewhen. Manfred von Ardenne is well known germany wide as one of few east german scientist. I worked on EMP, electron micro probe, and other instruments which inherited the core principles.

Just an interesting side note, as Dr. Ardenne was actually pulled away from his SEM prototype research project to instead focus on Germany's nuclear weapon program at the time. Of course, it was already late in the war, most of the "intelligencia" of the time recognized the war was a disaster, and the nuclear research program was very far from ever reaching a workable design strategy for such a weapon, but that it was even being considered at the time is still chilling to ponder.