Introduction: The “real” semiconductor processing world consists of the universe of industrial and government semiconductor laboratories and manufacturing facilities plus a small number of university departments with heavy funding from industry—or a consortium of the above. We are bombarded with reports of how the drive toward faster, denser, lower power consuming and more reliable semiconductor products will accelerate with time. The smallest features of today's devices have already shrunk from view in visible light microscopes! Electron microscopy studies of semiconductor device materials, interconnects, insulators, and device packaging materials play a vital role in these extraordinarily “high tech” and financially important arenas.

Shifting semiconductor analytical paradigms: For the most part, the analytical paradigm has shifted: from visible light microscopy to SEM analysis, at low magnification and high accelerating voltage… to much more sophisticated SEM analysis, at high resolution and/or low accelerating voltages… to the many variations of TEM available today… and to new types of scanning probe microscopy.