Anomalies on semiconductor substrates, such as process contaminants, post-polishing substrate fragments, or voids, must be accurately located and identified in order to obtain the cleanliness required by the next generation of integrated microcircuits. While technological advances have reduced the critical anomaly size to less than 80 nm, existing...

Nanotechnology is the study of the control of matter at the atomic and molecular level, and is focused mainly on the creation of materials and equipment to work within that scale. One thing holding back the advancement of this technology is the lack of experimental tools capable of visualizing nanoprocesses in real time across their full range of...