Silicon art on a microchip
posted Oct 13th 2005 2:40PM
Ok kids, for today's homework assignment you'll need to turn off your computer, dig out your warranty card to make sure you'll still covered, pry open your desktop or laptop, toss aside anything that doesn't look important, and rip the processor from the clutches of your motherboard. Now place the chip under a high-powered microscope (you do have one, don't you?) and prepare to be wowed by what you see. Hopefully your computer is more than several years old (probably should have mentioned that in the beginning) so you'll have a good chance of witnessing the dying art of silicon-etched graphics. Cell biology researcher Michael Davidson stumbled upon this little-known trend a decade ago, when he discovered a microscopic etching of Waldo (of Where's Waldo fame) while photographing a Hewlett-Packard chip. A little research revealed that engineers have been sneakily including all kinds of graphics and messages on their chips since the late 60's, competing with one another to create the most elaborate artwork. Davidson has catalogued some 300 individual chips bearing such images as Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, and even a Russian message intended for Cold War-era Soviet operatives (who were attempting to reverse-engineer American technology). Unfortunately for microscopic-art lovers, the manufacturing difficulties that can arise from these silicon "easter eggs" have made it all but impossible for modern engineers to go all Picasso on the latest Pentium speed demons.
Funny this article should come up, about 2 weeks ago I discovered a harley davidson logo on my old Presario
what kinda "high-powered" microscope are we talkin about here? Is this something average Joe can go looking for or do I have to take it to the microbiology lab at school and use their equipment?
hmm i just got a processer at a 5 finger discount from my school... i wonder..
hmm i just got a processer at a 5 finger discount from my school... i wonder..
TRAINS!!!
Soooo, is there a link available to look at this guys pictures that he has taken?
Little known if you're not an engineer. hehe... I do it on my chips too.
BTW don't think of james bond about that "operatives" bit. In the cold war both sides reverse engineered the tech that "the other guys" had so it was not uncommon for the teams to leave messages to each other knowing the other camp would discover them during reverse engineering
Uhh, Err, Can you say old news. I even did it on a chip I designed in a CMOS class I took when I was an undergrad at Purdue back in the early 90's. I had to force an area where I could turn of the DRC Checking to do it, but you were able to see it w/o a Microscope (2um tech as oppose to the 65nm that I'm working on now.)
Trivia: He's called Wally in the UK. The books were all 'Where's Wally?'.
#3 - 64bProphet - you must click the READ link to get to the CNET article, which gives links to many of the very interesting chip artwork.
heres the link to a few pictures : http://news.com.com/2300-1006_3-5887476-1.html
I'm put big money on "art" being found an the iPod Nano's PSOC.
f
I found this a couple years ago when I did a report on in.
Cool stuff.
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html
There's a bunch of pictures from his site. He's also the dude who posts pictures of Beer from electron microscopes.
This is an obvious photoshop hack and I'm really surprised you gadget heads didn't spot it.
There is no way physically possible to produce such finely detailed artwork on an IC mask, you have such close tolerances on those chips that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle will render any such artwork unreadable. A fuzzy blob is all you'd get, and it would ruin any chip you tried it on.
The guy is a fraud, not a collector of IC-art.
#14 If IBM can arrange gold atoms in a pattern that spells I B M then anything is possible.
The guy who thinks it's a photoshop job seriously needs to go back to school.
A good set of galleries can be found here: http://www.chipworks.com/gallery/gallery1.asp
Rusty Shackleford is totally wrong on this. In 1971 the feature width of Intel's first microprocessor was 10 microns. That means a wire was 1/100mm thick. Today it's about 1/6000mm wide.
John, Luffy, and Chris
You're correct, Rusty doesn't know WTF he's talking about. First the widths of the material (Typically Metal Layers, but can use Poly too) are a lot greater than the gate widths (which is the width of the gate of the transitors and is what is stated as the process node.) Companies have been putting out 90nm silicon for a over a year now, and we'll be seeing 65nm technology comming soon.
BTW, Under the 'fine print' section the redish brown area appears to be a memory bank which has hundreds of thousands transistors being at least 3x the gate width across. You can place metal lines and etch holes (vias) that reside in much much smaller dimensions accurately, then what is done to spell the letters.
As far as ruining a chip that you put it on, you're crazy. You could do it right over silicon that's actually being used and not affect anything as long as you don't have any via's crossing where the letters are. When you do artwork on a chip, you usually do it on unused space (as sparce as it is you can allways find some) you have nothing connected to it, you have no magnetic fields close by, no parasitic transitors being created to cause problems.
Basically you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
TAZ
Sounds a bit like the old tradition of writing messages on blank portion of vinyl lps and 45s, a tradition that sadly appears to have no equivalent on cds.
how do u remove the processor. i have a old comp lieing around, and i want to look at this silicon art.
#20, RIP IT OUT!!
dude, that is A W E S O M E
thats about the sweetest thing ive seen all year, peace folks