In recent years, focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) has become a broadly useful characterization, sample preparation, and material processing technique for a wide range of applications and disciplines, although it started out as a niche technique for semiconductor industry and materials science research. Today’s FIB-SEM instruments can have a variety of different ion sources such as Ga, He, Ne, Xe, Li or several different metal alloys. FIB instruments come in single, dual, and triple column configurations with multiple ion and electron beams. Many systems are also equipped with analytical tools such as EDS (energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer), EBSD (electron backscatter diffraction) system, WDS (wavelength dispersive spectrometer), CL (cathodoluminescence) detector, SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer) and/or environmental control devices such as heated or cryogenic stages. Advances in the instrument hardware and software have resulted in increased system stability and robustness which is a prerequisite to process automation. However, all these improvements and advances come with a price – exponential increase in data volume and complexity.
Today, the biggest challenge for many FIB-SEM practitioners may be their ability to extract useful information from the deluge of data produced by the instruments, in a timely manner. For FIB-SEM and its hyphenated techniques (e.g., cryo-FIB-SEM, FIB-SEM-EBSD, FIB-SEM-SIMS, etc.), a significant part of the experimental effort must be spent in the metadata and data management tasks (e.g., formatting, transferring, tracking, curation) before any “information” can be extracted from the data. In this presentation, several examples of materials characterization applications that are uniquely enabled by FIB-SEM will be described, and some of the available avenues for managing the resulting data for the open and re-usable data paradigm will be explored.