Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU

Case_Argentina writes "Interesting article and photos on News.com about a guy who does microscopy photography discovering hidden images in computer chips. The images, made by tiny wires connecting the deeper layers of the chip, were left there by engineers leaving messages to competitors, or just having plain fun. Snoopy, Daffy Duck, Dilbert, Dogbert and lots of silicon characters and images can be seen at The Silicon Zoo." Update: 10/15 06:27 GMT by Z : As some readers have pointed out, if history serves you can look forward to reading about this again in 2007.

Comments

A very cool site, but it's been around for a while

[plover]

It was new to me about six years ago, anyway. I had purchased a $5.00 Radio Shack microscope so I could take in the craftsmanship of an old piece of core memory I'd come across. (It was 16KB and the core took up about 8" x 10" on the card). I have been collecting old memory, and had discovered I could easily pry the aluminum cans off of IBM chips with my Swiss Army Knife. I was looking at a late 1980s vintage chip and discovered a design! Later on after discovering a link to the Silicon Zoo I contacted the author. We exchanged notes, I dropped the chip in the mail, and he photographed it beautifully, and put it up on his site. I thought it was really cool.

I've looked at a lot of chips since then, but the old 100x pocket microscope can't make out any details on these new high density chips. When they started cramming billions of transistors 60nm apart, there's very little chance of spotting anything optically.

Copyright?

[tepples]

Are these images used with permission? Or have the copyright or trademark owners of these images taken any legal action against chip makers that use these images without permission?

Not new but still fun

[billsoxs]

This has been going on since the beginning of the IC. In fact I heard once that the Soviets copied some IC (I think from TI) and even had the Easter eggs on it... They did not seem to know the difference - or else they were told to copy it exactly and they did it so that they did not get into trouble.

Re:Not new but still fun

[NanoGradStudent]

I'm not sure about the exact duplicate part, but here's at least one Easter Egg targeted towards Soviet IC reverse engineers.

Someday...

[Landshark17]

...will archeologists unearth computers and try do learn about our primitive culture by seeing what we drew on chips, kind of like archeologists today look at cave painting.

What I want to see

[Lars T.]

is an image of Zonk stomped on by that large Python foot. His work today has again been outstandingly typical for him.

unleash the copyright lawyers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of these images are trademarks or subject to copyright. How much you wanna bet a bored lawyer will see this as a revenue opportunity?

Small fry vs big fishes...

[CreateWindowEx]

I'm not too surprised that tattoos haven't been pursued by the copyright holders, because it's pretty nickel-and-dime, and probably in a lot of cases it increases the value of the brand (except for family-focused characters portrayed in adult situations), and suing some guy for a cartoon tattoo is likely to generate a PR backlash.

Big chip companies inscribing copyrighted characters onto their chips, on the other hand, is quite surprising. My guess is that the legal staffs of these companies weren't consulted on this practice, because basically if you have a clue you know that risking litigation for some geeky easter egg that has almost no positive benefit for the company is completely stupid, especially where it's not completely out of the question for the IP holder to be awarded a per-unit royalty retroactively. I suppose the engineers at those companies probably have little experience with the IP issues involving licensed properties and haven't yet achieved that level of defensive paranoia that is pretty much required these days.

Who remembers Number 9 video cards?

[asbestos-man]

Same type of thing except they had sayings related to the Beatles on their video card boards.

I did this!

[jkeegan]

When I was in college, a friend and I took VLSI Design, even though we were the only two in the class.. We used tools like oct-vem to lay out circuits of our own design, then they actually had our chips sent out to be manufactured.

I wrote an 8-bit ALU with carry-look-ahead lines so you could assemble multiple chips together without the delay of normal carry propagation. When we got them back, I connected 4 of them together to act as a 32-bit ALU.

When laying out the chip, the logic for my chip (as apparently is often the case during VLSI design classes) was very small compared to the size of the chip itself.. So on our chips we put the logic in the center, and when running lines out to the pins, routed them in such a way as to make space for a big rectangular area. My chip had my name written in it, in silicon. :)

bill sux

[adrianmonk]

Since nobody else has mentioned it yet, there is always this one

Re:A very cool site, but it's been around for a wh

[plover]

Very nicely done!

I've always just had various ancient memory boards dangling from paper clip chains and wire-wrap wire in my cube. I've got a long time span of stuff, from the 1977 vintage 16K core to about 8 MB worth of 4KB, 16KB, and 64KB 16-pin DIP chips (which had to be individually socketed, 72 to a 512KB board, and God help you if you bent a pin and didn't spot it), some 256KB SIMMs (oooh, SIMMs!), then some 1MB, 2MB and 4MB cards from some old PS/2s. I don't have nearly as many old PC100 DIMMs hanging around, perhaps a few 16MB and 64MB sticks, an oddly shaped stick of laptop RAM, and a few RAM chips from some old video buffers. One of the three 256Kx3 RAM chips is where I found the eagle that I sent to the photographer.

But I don't have your eye, so mine is much more of a random collection of junk that used to store bits. I bet framing or mounting select pieces would help much.

What I'd really like to do is frame the core and nicely mount a magnifying glass over the frame so visitors could see the individual cores.

Bosses don't like this

[elgatozorbas]

The boss doesn't necessarily like this. I once did a chip design (while a student). This was a 'large' passive device, meaning features of 50m or so (a 4x4 antenna array at 26 GHz). We added a Bart Simpson picture, but were warned it should not be rastered (i.e. using small dots to make shades of grey). Apparently the etching of small dots pollutes the chemicals rather heavily such that they need to be replaced early, or something (this was some time ago), or maybe they were afraid that etched out parts would end up somewhere unwanted. Anyway, we were advised not to go too far.

Pics of Linux Penguin on VLSI Project layout

[Phil_EECS]

We never actually got to fabricate it, but when my VLSI group finished our chip last semester we put some art in the whitespace. I was too busy with final integration to actually draw it, but the rest of the group agreed it would be cool to put tux on the layout. A groupmate spent 30 minutes or so creating a pixelized version of tux in the Metal 3 layer. We also have names & school logo on the right and a trombone ASCII art on the left (the multiplier was a little long so we had plenty of whitespace). Tux art is blown up in the linked image. Sorry about the poor quality, but I don't want to suck too much bandwidth and anger the sysadmins. Chip Image

Feynmann's text

[Spy der Mann]

This might be a little off-topic, but hey, this is slashdot. We need to have an interesting link on funny stories once in a while.

Feynmann's text on nanotechnology - viewed with a microscope.