Strobe & stitch
Our unique strobe & stitch mode provides unrivalled lateral pixel resolution for measuring 4D topography and sample vibrations. This mode is particularly useful when:
- the lateral size of microsystem structure features or of the vibration mode scales is small relative to the measurement area. This is often the case for SAW, which have wavelengths in the micron range and surfaces of several square centimeters, or for crystals, as illustrated below.
- samples have steep local slopes and large surfaces. Indeed, a high slope often requires the use of higher NA objectives, having a field of view smaller than the surface to be measured, necessitating to be compensated by the use of an image stitching. This can be the case with some deformable lenses, micromirrors and capacitive membranes.
Vibration stitching over multiple fields of view is actually more accurate and reliable than in the general case of stitching topography images. Indeed, the imperfections of the stage are a static components that are automatically subtracted when the vibrations are extracted from the topography. There is no “tilp/tip” correction to be made or calibrated on each image.
A strobe & stitch application is illustrated here below with the measurement of a 5 mm diameter quartz oscillator. The vibrations amplitude versus time and the vibrations amplitude maps are the result of a stitching over 5×5 individual measurements, each performed using a 5x objective. Each measurement has a pixel resolution of 25 Megapixels.
