Open AccessSoftware acceleration techniques for the simulation of scanning electron microscope images
Author(s) -
Seeger Adam,
Fretzagias Charalampos,
Taylor Russell
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
scanning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.359
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1932-8745
pISSN - 0161-0457
DOI - 10.1002/sca.4950250508
Subject(s) - speedup , precomputation , computer science , software , computational science , simulation software , simulation , parallel computing , algorithm , computation , programming language
A scanning electron microscope (SEM) simulator was developed based on the models used in the MONSEL software. This simulator extends earlier work by introducing an object‐oriented framework and adding optimization methods based on precomputation of electron trajectories. Several optimizations enable speedup by factors of 5–100 on a single processor over unoptimized simulations without introducing additional approximations. The speedup for a particular surface depends on the selfsimilarity of the surface at the scale of the electron penetration depth. We further accelerate by parallelizing the calculations for a total speedup of about 100‐2000 on 30 processors. The goal of this work was to create a system capable of simulating a quantitatively accurate SEM image of a relatively unconstrained surface. Results of this work include simulation software, optimization algorithms, performance measurements with various optimizations, and examples of simulated images.