Advanced Software Capabilities for Automated EBSD

Abstract

Venables (1973) coined the term electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to describe backscatter Kikuchi diffraction in the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The first commercial system was produced by Moon and Harris of Custom Camera Designs in 1984 and was an outgrowth of the system designed by Dingley at the University of Bristol. This design was later provided to both Oxford Instruments and Ris0 National Laboratory out of which the OPAL™ and HKL™ systems evolved. The first fully automated EBSD system capable of automatic indexing of EBSD patterns and subsequent mapping of the spatial distribution of crystallographic orientation was introduced by Wright (1992). The term Orientation Imaging Microscopy or OIM™ was coined to describe this automated technique for forming images by mapping orientation data obtained from automated EBSD (Adams et al., 1993). Dingley and Adams co-founded TSL (or TexSEM Laboratories) in 1994 to produce the first commercial automated EBSD system based on the system developed by the group at Yale University (Adams, Wright, and Kunze). TSL adopted the name OIM™ for its automated EBSD products. Much of what was included in the original TSL system has become a standard for modern EBSD systems.