Your Questions Answered: Electron Microscope Workflows with EM Flow Creator

EM Flow Creator is available across the current Hitachi range:

• Tabletop series: Including the TM4000PlusIII and FlexSEMII
• Tungsten SEMs: Including the SU3800 and SU3900
• Field emission SEMs: Including the SU3900SE, SU3800SE, SU8700, SU7000, and SU8600
• TEMs: Including the HT7800 family; HF5000

The available command set differs between them, based on the software platform and the optical systems. TEM recipes work with a different set of blocks than SEM recipes.

There's also a version specifically for the tabletop series, covering routine automatic image acquisition without the functions that aren't relevant on a tabletop instrument.

No, 100 was just the example shown in the webinar. The ceiling comes from your microscope's control software, not from EMFC. Some instrument software versions cap out at 9,999 images.

EMFC is an acquisition and automation tool, not a measurement package, though basic measurements can be performed.

What it controls is the sequence:

• Accelerating voltage
• Magnification
• Detector selection
• Stage movement
• Auto brightness and contrast
• Auto focus and stigma correction
• Loops
• Conditional logic
• Image processing
• Python script blocks if you need them

In the particle sizing example shown during the webinar, EMFC acquired the image set and passed it to image analysis software that handled binarisation and particle size distribution automatically.

EMFC reads out the detector exactly as it would if you pressed capture, and saves in whatever formats the capture command supports on your instrument. If your microscope only writes TIFF, JPEG and BMP, that's what EMFC writes. If it supports a raw format, EMFC can save raw. The same applies to 8-bit versus 16-bit.

You control how often correction happens. Auto brightness, auto focus, and auto stigmation can each be called during the recipe at whatever interval suits the sample.

That flexibility matters because the right answer depends on your sample and your preparation. A well-mounted flat specimen might rarely need correction. An inclined or topographically varied surface might need it often.

Yes. This is what target and template matching is for: the software detects the feature itself, so irregular spacing and unpredictable positions don't matter.

The image processing block covers more than template matching alone. Binarisation and histogram modification are in there too, which means you can tune fairly precisely what does and doesn't count as a target. Setting that up takes more effort than a simple particle or fibre target, but it's front-loaded effort. Once the recipe works, it works every run.

Cropping still has to be done manually, outside EMFC. That step exists so you can confirm the correct target has been selected before the recipe starts working from it.

Not yet. As AI is integrated into later versions, that's a plausible route, but it isn't available today.

EMFC starts the software and runs the measurement, but it can't control Oxford-specific settings. Those need to be saved in a profile beforehand; otherwise the default or last-used settings apply.

EDS is generally better integrated than other third-party software, because SEM and EDS already communicate bidirectionally about stage position, magnification and so on.

At the current development stage, Oxford Instruments is the only vendor to have supplied the full command list needed to address EDS properly. Work is under way with other vendors, including Bruker, to reach the same level of integration.

Version and module requirements depend on the combination of microscope, EDS detector and software version, so that's a question for your Hitachi contact rather than one with a universal answer.