Electrostatic Force Microscopy

AFM can be used to detect various electrical characteristics on the surface of materials. These methods can be run in static mode or dynamic mode based on the information to be detected. Detection properties such as current, conductance, surface potential and capacitance are becoming increasingly important in many applications including semiconductors, solar cells and batteries, conductive polymers and nanoelectronics. These applications require the measurement of the electrical performance of increasingly miniaturized equipment and functional components. For these applications, testing is usually done in the form of a traditional silicon AFM cantilever coated with a conductive coating combined with specialized techniques. Among them, the probe made of conductive diamond is more suitable for some of these methods. All these modes provide sample morphology and electrical characteristics data.

Electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) uses a combination of Tapping Mode, Lift Mode and a conductive afm tip to provide information about the electric field on a conductive sample. Among them, each sample line is scanned by Tapping Mode to obtain terrain data first. The terrain information is stored and retraced with a height offset in lift mode, and then electrical data is collected.