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To the right you'll see an overview of the user interface. You can click on any of the indicated panels to see an explanation of that part of the interface. The interface contains the following panels:

• Menus
• Focus Display
• Control Panel
• Coordinate Panel
• Image Display
• Chat Panel

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Menus

The menu bar at the top of the microscope window provides a few options that will occasionally be required.

• View:
  Options related to how the image from the microscope is displayed.
  • Show/Hide scale:
    Select whether a linear scale relating on-screen distances to real-world measurements should be displayed. The scale will show up in the lower-left corner of the image.
    Turned off by default.

• Microscope:
  Options related to how the microscope functions.
  • Show/Don't Show images while moving:
    The microscope server can optionally send out low-resolution images while the microscope is in motion. These images are in black-and-white, and are often blurry, but they do provide better feedback On slow connections, however, the moving images are a serious hindrance, so this option has to be deliberately turned on by the user.
    Turned off by default.

Focus Display

The focus display allows manually focussing the microscope by moving the stage up and down. This is useful when the autofocus doesn't produce a good result, or when you wish to focus on a certain plane of a very uneven region.

Usually the autofocus is left on. To disable autofocus and move the stage up or down, simply move the slider and wait. The client will wait for a second or two in order to be sure that you've stopped moving the slider, and then will send a movement command to the microscope. The image will then be updated, and you can decide whether the new focus is an improvement.

To prevent you from crashing the object into your wafer, you're limited to moving the stage within a certain range around the autofocus point. At 5X, you can move the stage within a range of +/- 50 microns; the range of motion is narrower at higher magnifications.

To re-enable autofocus, simply hit the 'Use Autofocus' button.
 

Control Panel

• Take and Cede:
  To avoid conflicts, only one user can control the microscope at a time; these buttons let you take control and subsequently give it up again. If you're not in control, you cannot move the microscope or change any of its settings.

  The Take button requests control of the microscope; the request is granted if you have authorization to control the microscope, and if no one else is already in control. Once you've been granted control of the microscope, the message "In control of microscope" is displayed and the Take button becomes inactive.

  The Cede button gives up control of the microscope. Once you've ceded control, Cede becomes inactive and the Take button becomes active again, until you or someone else takes control again.

• Save:
  The Save button requests a high-resolution image of the field of view, which will be downloaded and saved to a filename that you select. When running as an applet, the Save button will always be disabled, because applets can't write to the filesystem.
• Reload:
  When you're in control of the microscope, this button will cause a new snapshot to be taken, without moving the microscope or changing any settings.
• Small B/W, Medium, Large:
  These buttons select from the three different image sizes that are available. Small B/W is a 270x201-pixel black-and-white image; Medium is a 320x200-pixel colour image; Large is an 800x600 colour image.

  If you use Small B/W, and disable the sending of images while the microscope is moving (using the menu option), the microscope is fairly usable over a connection as slow as a 33.6 modem. Large is perhaps too large to be practical, though it certainly looks impressive. :)

Settings Panel

• Move to a given X and Y coordinate (though it's much easier to use the Image Display). X, Y, and Z coordinates are measured roughly in microns. (The arbitrary hardware units used by the microscope are converted to microns, but the conversion factor hasn't been calibrated carefully. The values are roughly correct to about 5 or 10%.)
• Select from 5X,10X,20X,50X and 100X magnifications
• Select the viewing mode from among brightfield, darkfield, and ICR (or Nomarski) modes.
• Set the aperture setting, ranging from 1 to 5. The aperture setting only applies when in brightfield mode; in darkfield and ICR modes, a special aperture setting has to be used.
• Set the light intensity. For brightfield mode, the intensity should be set to around 30-50%. For the darkfield and ICR modes, a higher intensity of around 60-80% is required. A setting that's too high will produce an over-exposed picture in which few details are visible.
• Rotate the wafer by changing its angle. When you rotate the wafer, the server will try to modify the X and Y coordinates so that you remain looking at the same feature. However, this has only been calibrated very crudely at the moment, so it isn't very accurate.

To change one or more settings, enter, select, or set a new value in the corresponding fields. The command isn't sent to the microscope until you hit the Send Microscope Settings button, so you can make several changes and apply them all at once. Remember, these commands will only be accepted if you are in control of the microscope.
 

Image Display

This panel displays the image, and is the primary way that you'll move around the wafer.

You can move the microscope one half-screen in a cardinal direction by clicking on one of the four direction arrow bars around the image. Alternatively, you can click on a given point in the image to center the field of view around that point. Anyone else connected to the microscope will have their display updated to the new field of view.

Right-clicking on the image will bring up a pop-up menu, which will let you select different interaction modes. The default mode is "Move the microscope", where clicking on a point centers the view around that point.

The "Measure distances" mode lets you measure distances on a wafer by clicking and holding down the mouse button on one point, and then dragging the mouse to another point. The distance between the two points will be continuously computed and displayed on the image. When you release the button, the coordinates will be sent to other users connected to the microscope, and they'll see the distance you just measured.

The "Draw rectangles" mode lets you draw rectangles on the image by clicking and holding down the mouse button on one point, and then dragging the mouse to another point. A rectangle will be drawn with the two points as the opposite corners. This would be useful when you're chatting with a co-worker about the wafer, and need to draw attention to some feature of interest. When you release the button, the coordinates will be sent to all other users connected to the microscope, and they'll see the rectangle you've just drawn.
 

Chatting

This panel is used for chatting with the other people connected to the microscope.

• Minimizing bar:
  If you're not interested in chatting, you can hide the chatting panel by clicking on this bar.
• Chat text:
  This scrolling text box contains the text of the chat session; new messages are added to the bottom.
• Connected users:
  This box lists the names of the users currently connected to the server.
• Input field:
  The white box at the bottom is a text input field; when you type a message into the field and hit the Enter key, the message will be sent to anyone else connected to the microscope.

This is a very minimal chatting capability, and doesn't have the sophisticated features of dedicated chat software (saving a discussion to a file, exchanging files with other users, etc.). If users find this a limitation, we'll work on integration of third-party chatting software.

Last modified: December 17, 2001