Decent optical microscope is more than adequate for photos like that; electron microscope is for gate-level. Zac Brown and Adam Laurie are doing awesome stuff

Decent optical microscope is more than adequate for photos like that; electron microscope is for gate-level. Zac Brown and Adam Laurie are doing awesome stuff (with cheap equipment, relatively) in chip teardowns; basically the stuff Chris Tarnovsky (flylogic, now ioactive) does with $5mm stuff, they do 90% with $5-10k.