Oriented AF1VI Scanning on a Large Sample with Cooperative Rotating Stage and Auxiliary Optical Microscopy

Atomic force microscope (AFM) is a powerful tool capable of constructing accurate 3-D surface profiles at a nanometer resolution. However, the scanning area of the AFM is limited by the piezo-scanner. Hence, this will restrict the AFM from scanning those applications to large samples. Moreover, some features (e.g., strip shape) orientation relative to the AFM scanning direction is necessary to be considered. To address these issues, the AFM system combined with a rotation stage and a long-range stage is constructed. Besides, an automatic method to move the oriented scan region into the AFM workspace is provided through the assistance of an optical microscope (OM). Finally, the result shows that the AFM scanning on large samples is achievable. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)