While electronic microscopes are still costly, you can build a scanning-tunneling microscope using nothing but a couple dollars' worth of parts from Radioshack and Wal-Mart. A student at my old high school a few years ago made one for a science fair project; it only created a one-dimensional image (he didn't have time to extend it to full 2D) but it worked.
How it works: a piezoelectric material, such as that found in speakers, can be manipulated precisely enough to move the head of a scanning tunneling microscope. The "head" of the microscope can be made by using a pair of extremely bad Wal-Mart scissors and cutting a piece of wire; this will usually create a very rough cut with a tiny slice of wire that extends beyond the cut, ending at atom thickness.
This wire can then be strapped to the piezoelectric material, and now all you need are some basic electronics to power and run the thing. Of course, this part is a lot of work, but it doesn't require any fancy expensive hardware.
For now. It's a wonderful service and I hope it continues for a long time, but you shouldn't depend on it to save any particular thing, and it's much harder to find things in archive.org than on the open web. I'm still grieving over the loss of "Networked PostScript Printer Installation as Illustrated Through Interpretive Dance".
The STM project is clever and well-known. A traditional electron microscope, on the other hand, is of much more use to the would-be reverse-engineer/DRM fighter. Hence my interest in widening their availability.
Hmm, yeah, I guess you need to be able to electrify your entire sample in order to look at it with an STM. How much current do you need? Could you sputter silver onto the surface of the chip or something?
How it works: a piezoelectric material, such as that found in speakers, can be manipulated precisely enough to move the head of a scanning tunneling microscope. The "head" of the microscope can be made by using a pair of extremely bad Wal-Mart scissors and cutting a piece of wire; this will usually create a very rough cut with a tiny slice of wire that extends beyond the cut, ending at atom thickness.
This wire can then be strapped to the piezoelectric material, and now all you need are some basic electronics to power and run the thing. Of course, this part is a lot of work, but it doesn't require any fancy expensive hardware.