title: Software acceleration techniques for the simulation of scanning electron microscope images.
abstract: 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 self-similarity 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175, USA. seeger@cs.unc.edu
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Seeger
authors.forename: Charalampos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fretzagias
authors.forename: Russell
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Taylor
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D007313:Insecta / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D008855:Microscopy, Electron, Scanning / Q000379:methods*; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D012984:Software