Measurement technique for the incident electron current in secondary electron detectors and its application in scanning electron microscopes

A measurement technique for incident electron current in secondary electron (SE) detectors, especially the Everhart‐Thornley (ET) detector, based on signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), which uses the histogram of a digital scanning electron microscope (SEM) image, is described. In this technique, primary electrons are directly incident on the ET detector. This technique for measuring the correlation between incident electron current and SNR is applicable to the other SE detectors. This correlation was applied to estimate the efficiency of the ET detector itself, to evaluate SEM image quality, and to measure the geometric SE collection efficiency and the SE yield. It was found that the geometric SE collection efficiency at each of the upper and lower detectors of a Hitachi S‐4500 SEM was greater than 0.78 at all working distances.