Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have developed a novel tabletop device that takes three-dimensional X-ray (CT) images of integrated circuits. The highly detailed scans produced by the prototype device inspect the billions of electrical components, some as small as 160 nanometers (billionths of a meter), packed onto a microchip.

Such a tool would provide a new way to identify defects and impurities and verify that a group of microchips, regardless of where they are manufactured, are built according to their design specifications—before they are inserted into cell phones, computers, and other devices people use every day. (In practice, not every chip would be examined, only representative samples from a large batch fabricated at a manufacturing plant.)

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