One of the most important commercial areas in contemporary materials science concerns the miniaturization of integrated circuits. As the size of such devices decreases, their operation becomes more critically influenced by the presence of defects and by the nature of the interfaces involved. High resolution TEM can play an important role in determining fundamental aspects of the structure of these materials. The present article describes some of our recent work on this problem.The first important step in this business is the fabrication of good specimens. It is necessary to arrange for the interface or defect in question to be parallel to the electron beam for obtaining the maximum degree of structural information. This requires making “cross-section” TEM specimens which is achieved by the following procedure. Firstly, several circuits are sandwiched together using an appropriately strong glue (e.g., “Micromeasurements 610”). They are then sliced into thin slabs (approximately 1 mm thick) using a diamond saw, cut into 3 mm diameter discs, mechanically polished to reduce the thickness and finally ion-beam milled to electron transparency. The composite is generally fragile and so careful handling is required in each of these stages. The yield of high quality specimens for high resolution work is often low and perfection of the experimental approach is necessary before it becomes routine.