Future Trends of Cross-Sectional Transmission Electron Microscopy for Electronic and Photonic Devices

Cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (XTEM) has played an important role in silicon very large scale integration (VLSI) device development, process evaluation and failure analysis. More recently, XTEM has also bee applied to photonic device evaluation and diagnosis. Most difficulties in XTEM sample preparations for both silicon VLSI and photonic devices have been overcome.