I am a circuit designer and SEM cross-sections are quite commonly used by transistor device designers during design and debug. They also appear in papers about

I am a circuit designer and SEM cross-sections are quite commonly used by transistor device designers during design and debug. They also appear in papers about transistor device design. A relevant conference is International Electron Devices Meeting and the related journal paper is IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. Unfortunately, most of those papers are behind the IEEE paywall. Chipworks is a company that reverse engineers chips for analysis by competitors. Their websites has lots of cool SEM cross-sections: http://www.google.com/search?cx=w&q=chipworks+SEM&tbm=isch http://www.google.com/search?cx=w&q=chipworks+SEM&tb... Even though I design circuits using these devices, I still find the SEMs mindblowing.