The recent development in SEM focuses on the high variability of use-cases as well as on the development of special single-purpose SEMs. The increasing variability of SEMs by objective lens extenders brings about more applications and improves the possible commercial impact of the recent generation of SEMs. As the lateral resolution of the recent SEMs is on the physical limits given by the uncorrected spherical aberration, further progress in this direction is possible through the application of a spherical aberration corrector. However, the application of standard state-of-the-art multipole correctors would increase the cost of SEMs above an acceptable level, so simpler and cheaper alternative corrector units could have a high commercial potential.

Keywords
optics