Introduction

Transistors are, by far, the largest number of artificial objects made by human technology. This device has caused and fueled the “Third Wave” of history. As integration and miniaturization of devices continue to progress, auxiliary techniques have been invented to aid in their development and failure analysis. Focused ion beams (FIB) is one of those techniques without which such progress would have been very slow or even impossible. The primary use of FIB is in micro-machining, which is the programmed, controllable removal or addition of material for fabrication, analysis, or repair on a sample at the sub-micrometer scale. As modern small-scale fabrication and repair of structures progresses, FIB has become an essential tool for work at the micro- and nano-scales. An FIB system is capable of being used as a combined milling/deposition machine and as a scanning ion microscope (with different modes of contrast generation), so that as the milling/deposition work proceeds, it can be inspected. In addition, the marriage of an FIB with an SEM (scanning electron microscope) or an AFM (atomic force microscope), allows a natural integration of techniques so that metrology can be performed and the work can be viewed using different imaging modes. The term “milling,” which is the sputtering of material, is borrowed in analogy with larger conventional machine tools such as lathes which remove material by cutting. FIBs are the micro- and nano-level lathes and milling machines used in modern small-scale technology [1, 2, 3].