As the new technologies continue to progress in recent years, materials characterization for such devices and processes becomes ever more challenging. Materials characterization, including chemical/elemental analysis and structural analysis, needs to be performed not only at higher sensitivity but also at much smaller scale. 

For structural analysis, traditional XRD and SEM based EBSD has been providing materials structural information with great precision. However, until recently, the emerging TEM based Precession Electron Diffraction (PED) technique has started bringing this analysis to the nanometer scale, which has been essential to meet the demand of the nano-scale structural analysis at the nowadays aggressively size-shrinking technologies and processes.