Repairing chips with an ion beam

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about a grad student using an ion beam machine to do cuts and jumps in the metallization of an integrated circuit. I saw these machines when I consulted at Schumberger, who had bought up the old Fairchild test division. It always amused me that both IC designers and board designers use cutting and jumping of traces to troubleshoot their circuits. My analog IC deign buddies tell me they frequently will put a few extra transistors or structures in a prototype IC so that they can jump it into a circuit if they need to. What I have seen is them using lasers to do the melting and fusion, perhaps because analog ICs have much wider line widths than new generation digital chips.