News Researchers announce microwave-based chip imaging breakthrough

It's something extremely useful for people who design ICs, and not all that useful to anyone else. The current technique requires specific doping so cannot be used to reverse-engineer existing designs (or future designs that lack doping) so no sneaky-beakey applications yet. If you could develop a more sensitive microwave sensor so you could detect the changes in reflection of non-doped traces then that opens up sneakey-beakey applications but is not much use for normal IC development (going over a whole chip like this for validation would be exorbitantly expensive, so you may as well make a dedicated wafer with the dopant added if you're going to test something).

 

Not so, semiconductor doping is extremely complicated, adding another tool to the arsenal (one that is relatively cheap too) could make a big difference to research in this area (which affects not only processors and things you're familiar with but also solar cells, chemistry, high performance amplifiers, etc.