A New Color Display System for Scanning Transmission Microscopes

Abstract

The most important aspect of the use of the scanning principle in high resolution transmission microscopy is that one can obtain separate electrical signals corresponding to the number of elastically and inelastically scattered electrons. A new display system has been constructed to take advantage of this quantitative information. This system has two independent functions: to display the picture produced by a scanning electron microscope and to interface the microscope to a computer.The color display system itself consists of a PEP-400 video-graphics storage terminal, a modified Zenith TV, and a video digital interface. The storage terminal is used as a scan converter and as storage for up to four pictures. It is possible to selectively erase portions of pictures stored in the terminal and then write new data into these regions. The storage terminal is thus a sort of random access memory. Information stored in the terminal will remain in storage for several days independent of whether the terminal's power is left on; however, a region can only be viewed for about five minutes, as the process of reading out a picture slowly destroys the picture.