WALTHAM, Mass., October 29, 2025 — From smartphones to autonomous cars to AI supercomputers, nearly every electronic innovation we use today depends on complicated structures at the atomic scale within silicon chips. As these chips increase in processing power and decrease in size, even the smallest fault can cause massive delays.
To help chipmakers keep pace and minimize delays, Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science, has introduced the Thermo Scientific™ Helios™ MX1 Plasma Focused Ion Beam (PFIB) Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). This system enables chip manufacturers to visualize and analyze buried semiconductor structures directly within fabrication (fab) environments.
Helios MX1 uses automated 3D reconstruction and metrology to significantly enhance the analysis of semiconductor logic, memory and advanced packaging devices. This fully automated wafer analysis system is uniquely designed to increase productivity in the fab by accelerating time-to-data — the speed at which engineers can see and understand what’s happening deep within a semiconductor.