AUTOMATED PARALLEL HIGH-SPEED ATOMIC-FORCE MICROSCOPY

An expandable system has been developed to operate multiple probes for the atomic force microscope in parallel at high speeds. The combined improvements from parallelism and enhanced tip speed in this system re present an increase in throughput by over two orders of magnitude. A m odular cantilever design has been replicated to produce an array of 50 cantilevers with a 200 mu m pitch. This design contains a dedicated i ntegrated sensor and integrated actuator where the cells can be repeat ed indefinitely. Electrical shielding within the array virtually elimi nates coupling between the actuators and sensors. The reduced coupling simplifies the control electronics, facilitating the design of a comp uter system to automate the parallel high-speed arrays. This automated system has been applied to four cantilevers within the array of 50 ca ntilevers, with a 20 kHz bandwidth and a noise level of less than 50 A ngstrom. For typical samples, this bandwidth allows us to scan the pro bes at 4 mm/s. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.