Orientation microscopy with fast EBSD

Automated backscatter Kikuchi diffraction in the SEM is about to become a tool for process and quality control. Mandatory requirements for these applications are a high speed and provisions to enable re-examination of the results at any time. Means and motivation for high speed electron backscattering diffraction are discussed. Separate acquisition and store of pattern sequences in an unprocessed data format, followed by offline calculation of the grain orientations, has many advantages over online orientation microscopy. With actually >1000 acquired patterns per second it is significantly faster than conventional electron backscattering diffraction. The data can be examined again using the original backscatter Kikuchi sequences, and the presence of a priori unknown phases can be checked for. Online pattern solving, as a dual task, is optional.