ARTIMAGEN - Artificial SEM Image Generator

Authors

• Petr Cizmar, Ph.D.
• Benjamin Swedlove

At the time of development affiliated at NIST (U. S. National Institute of Standards and Technology)

License

As this software was developed as part of work done by the United States Government, it is not subject to copyright, and is in the public domain. Note that according to GNU.org public domain is compatible with GPL.

Description

The Artificial SEM Image Generator (ARTIMAGEN) is a library that can generate artificial scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of various samples, including gold-on-carbon resolution sample, or some semiconductor structures. Numerous effects that appear in real SEMs are simulated (noise, drift-distortion, edge-effect, etc.), which enables assessment of imaging, metrology or other techniques that work with SEM micrographs. Unlike the real SEM images, the artificial images exhibit defined types and amounts of these effects, which is their key advantage.

The Artificial SEM Image Generator has been developed by Petr Cizmar at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The first version of the generator was written in C to evaluate the ISO-candidate image-sharpness-calculation techniques. Later, the Artificial SEM Image Generator became needed for other applications as well and support for new kinds of samples was added. In order to make the generator more flexible, it was rewritten to C++. The users now may take advantage of the modular object structure of the program.

C and programs may be linked with the library, which is enabled by the C wrapper.

Scientific Background

The scientific background of this software is described in the following publications:

• [1] P. Cizmar, A. E. Vladar, B. Ming, and M. T. Postek. Simulated SEM Images for Resolution Measurement. SCANNING, 30(5):381­391, Sep-Oct 2008.

• [2] P. Cizmar, A. E. Vladar, and M. T. Postek. Optimization of Accurate SEM Imaging by Use of Artificial Images Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7378 737815-1, May 2009

Should you use this generator for scientific research, please cite any of these papers.

Installation

Prerequisites

ARTIMAGEN depends on

• libtiff,
• fftw3, and
• lua5.3 libraries.

Compilation

For compilation, CMake is also needed.

The CMake installation procedure follows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && make install

For more information, see the CMake documantation at http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/runningcmake.html

Compilation as a shared library

In order to compile libartimagen as a shared library, use "ccmake .." instead of "cmake .." and set COMPILE_SHARED variable to ON. However, this is not recommended, since shared libraries must be compiled as the Position Independent Code, which is in case of this library (with use of the gcc-4.3.3 compiler) producing significantly less optimized code. :-(

Author's remark: This applied in 2009.