  Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an essential nanoinstrument technique for
several applications such as cell biology and nanoelectronics metrology and
inspection. The need for statistically significant sample sizes means that data
collection can be an extremely lengthy process in AFM. The use of a single AFM
instrument is known for its very low speed and not being suitable for scanning
large areas, resulting in very-low-throughput measurement. We address this
challenge by parallelizing AFM instruments. The parallelization is achieved by
miniaturizing the AFM instrument and operating many of them simultaneously.
This nanoinstrument has the advantages that each miniaturized AFM can be
operated independently and that the advances in the field of AFM, both in terms
of speed and imaging modalities, can be implemented more easily. Moreover, a
parallel AFM instrument also allows one to measure several physical parameters
simultaneously; while one instrument measures nano-scale topography, another
instrument can measure mechanical, electrical or thermal properties, making it
a Lab-on-an-Instrument. In this paper, a proof of principle (PoP) of such a
parallel AFM instrument has been demonstrated by analyzing the topography of
large samples such as semiconductor wafers. This nanoinstrument provides new
research opportunities in the nanometrology of wafers and nanolithography masks
by enabling real die-to-die and wafer-level measurements and in cell biology by
measuring the nano-scale properties of a large number of cells.
