In the last few years the development of Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM), equipped with a Field Emission Gun (FEG) and using in-lens specimen position, has allowed a significant improvement of the instrumental resolution . This is a result of the fine and bright probe provided by the FEG and by the reduced aberration coefficients of the strongly excited objective lens. The smaller specimen size required by in-lens instruments (about 1 cm, in comparison to 15 or 20 cm of a conventional SEM) doesn’t represent a serious limitation in the evaluation of semiconductor process techniques, where the demand of high resolution is continuosly increasing. In this field one of the more interesting applications, already described (1), is the observation of superlattice structures.In this note we report a comparison between secondary electron (SE) and backscattered electron (BSE) images of a GaAs / AlAs superlattice structure, whose cross section is reported in fig. 1. The structure consist of a 3 nm GaAs layer and 10 pairs of 7 nm GaAs / 15 nm AlAs layers grown on GaAs substrate. Fig. 2, 3 and 4 are SE images of this structure made with a JEOL JSM 890 SEM operating at an accelerating voltage of 3, 15 and 25 kV respectively. Fig. 5 is a 25 kV BSE image of the same specimen. It can be noticed that the 3nm layer is always visible and that the 3 kV SE image, in spite of the poorer resolution, shows the same contrast of the BSE image. In the SE mode, an increase of the accelerating voltage produces a contrast inversion. On the contrary, when observed with BSE, the layers of GaAs are always brighter than the AlAs ones , independently of the beam energy.
