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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.
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.
John
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?
Makes you wonder where they get the ideas from. Hypothetically speaking, I'd probably mark my chip with a giant penis. Why? The world may never know.
google.slashdot
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.
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More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs.
And here I was thinking this Slashdot story from exactly 2 years ago was a bit late...
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
that Alice and her fist of death are hiding on my cpu.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I once saw the virgin mary in a chip.... I have it for sale on ebay, hoping golden palace will pick it up... or at least a fanatic catholic.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Man... This gives porn in your PC a whole new meaning...
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Kids today.
You know, sooner later some kid is going to post an article on discovering this cool cartoon called "Thundar the Barbarian" and Slashdot is going to go nuts.
Clear, Dark Skies
By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: October 12, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT TalkBackE-mailPrintTrackBack More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs. In among the transistors and wire traces, he found something unexpected: Waldo.
"When I first saw him, he was upside-down, and I didn't recognize his face," the Florida-based cell biology researcher said.
Davidson suspected at first that the tiny design he saw was circular patterns added to the chip to thwart attempts by reverse-engineers to deduce its inner workings. But a second inspection showed it to be the characteristically hard-to-find character from the children's book series. "I realized, 'This is a doodle of some kind.' Then I started looking over the whole chip. I discovered Daffy Duck and other things on that chip," Davidson said.
That was just the start of a catalog that now holds more than 100 images of extremely small automobiles, dinosaurs, birds of prey, cartoon characters and even a wedding announcement silhouette--all tucked away among microchip circuits. Davidson calls the collection the Silicon Zoo.
After Davidson found Waldo, he and others started enthusiastically tearing apart Hewlett-Packard workstations and Digital Equipment Corp.'s Vax minicomputers from to find more. And when Davidson posted the images online, chip designers started sending him new samples, often challenging him to find the artwork without telling him what it was. Now he has more than 300 chips with unusual micrographic imagery.
While the width of the Waldo image is just over half the diameter of a human hair, sizes vary widely, depending on artistic impulses and the ever-shrinking features made possible with more advanced chip manufacturing. The difficulty of finding them is commensurate. "Some are so big, it's like finding an automobile in a haystack. Some are so small, it's like finding a needle," Davidson said.
Davidson is a cell biology researcher at Florida State University, but he also does educational Web sites about microscopy under contract for microscope makers Nikon and Olympus. He also has micrographs of everything from beer to vitamin C.
The silicon chip images show a particular kind of technical aesthetic. For example, one of the images Davidson finds most impressive is of Thor, the Norse god of thunder--a comparatively large, square image measuring about 1 millimeter on edge of an HP chip. The picture is created out of a matrix of tiny dots, each one a "sunken via," or a tiny wire that connects one layer of a chip to a deeper layer.
But such artistic whimsy in some cases came with a cost, Davidson said.
"A lot of chip designers told me it was absolutely forbidden. Some of them lost their jobs doing this stuff," he said.
With the extensive scrutiny that today's chips undergo, it's now impossible to sneak in a doodle without corporate authorities knowing. "You put Dogbert on one of these chips, and they're going to notice," Davidson said.
Historical etchings Silicon artistry is a skill more than three decades old. The earliest known images in the Silicon Zoo are on Texas Instruments chips from the late 1960s or early 1970s, featuring a sailboat, the Apollo mission lunar lander and the U.S.S. Enterprise starship from the "Star Trek" TV series.
The most prolific practitioners of silicon artistry were at HP, in Davidson's opinion. "They had a competition going as to who could create the most complex art," he said.
Intel microchips, by contrast, have hardly any artwork. "The only thing we found was that shepherd on that dual-ported RAM controller," he said. In a visual-technical pun, the shepherd is overseeing a ram with two heads, symbolizing a chip that governs random access memory (RAM) with two communication channels.
Not all the discoveries have been artistic. On one chip, there's a rambling hodgepodge of nonsensical legal
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Reading slashdot for news is like reading tabloids for "just the facts".
...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.
This sig is false.
If you've never read Dilbert? What kind of statement is that? It's marketed so extensively that it would be almost impossible to have not read a Dilbert cartoon.
It was new to me about six years ago, anyway.
I suppose everyone has heard of this, but for those that may not have... I remember many years ago seeing an image of tracks on Pentium silicon which spelled "bill sux".
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Did you bother to follow any of the links you posted? That was just a hoax.
I could see if this article was from a print magazine that needed to fill space, so they trot out an ancient story and re-run it. But (a) it is an online publication, and (b) there isn't a single recent example? What a waste of bits. Did their automatic modperl content filler accidentally compute the wrong date or something?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This won't really be driving sales until they put porn on there.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I don't know if you're interested or not, but I ended up acquiring four frames of IBM core memory which I took to framing and hanging above my couch. Yes, I know the color is off in that photo, but each frame is mounted over a gloss white piece of paper, which is then set on tan foamcore.
:)
Core memory is so cool.
Try this link from The Wayback Machine, they have quite a few of the pics: Archive.org
My favorites, The Buffalo and The Wright Brothers
did anybody find goatse on one of the processors yet?
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.
Same type of thing except they had sayings related to the Beatles on their video card boards.
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.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
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.
John
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.
I saw the first 3 letters of the word "viagra" somewhere on my motherboard.....oh wait
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
Unfortunately, it's a hoax:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blsux.htm
I don't get it.
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.
I say exactly the same thing to people who try to tell me that Santa doesn't exist.
[wimper sniffle] You take that back! It's a lie!!
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?