High resolution laser imaging, using high numerical aperture (NA) solid immersion lens (SIL) for backside fault isolation imposes stringent sample preparation requirements; as a result of the short focal length of SIL, a die must be thinned to a targeted thickness with less than a ±5 μm silicon thickness variation across the entire die. Flip chip packaged dice suffer from warpage due to various package sizes and substrate thicknesses. Such broad spectrums of part geometries pose a great challenge to meet such silicon planarity requirements. As relaxation of the packaged silicon during polishing causes the warpage profile to change dynamically and unpredictably throughout the thinning process, it has become an added challenge to meet the stringent sample preparation requirements. To overcome the stochastic nature of this problem, a two-step polishing recipe consisting of computer numerical control (CNC) mechanical milling and polishing processes has been developed to achieve sufficient silicon thickness uniformity to enable SIL imaging across an entire silicon chip as large as approximately 20 mm x 15 mm.