Combined Sources Sought Notice and Notice of Intent to Sole Source for Sparce Scanning Device

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is conducting market research to identify potential sources of commercial products or services that can meet their anticipated needs for a sparse scanning device. Specifically, they are looking for a compressed sensing scan generator suitable for scanning electron microscope (SEM)-based measurements of integrated circuit (IC) overlay structures. The device should be able to acquire images significantly faster than traditional full-frame scanning and should be able to compensate for inherent noise with inpainting, denoising, and other image processing algorithms. The key requirements for the device include a minimum 2, 16-bit resolution, 50 MHz DA converters for the X and Y scan generation hardware, capability to drive and control the NIST D400 Helios SEM sample stage, and minimum 4, 12-bit, 50MHz AD converters for image acquisition. • The compressed sensing scan generator should have its own graphical user interface running on a Windows 11 PC. • The reconstruction of the sparse scanned image for finding the area of interest in the field of view must be faster than 5 seconds. • A scan distortion correction solution must be implemented to achieve high geometry fidelity in the acquired images. • At least one image processing algorithm for improving image sharpness must be implemented to achieve high spatial resolution in the acquired images.