Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
...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.
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.
This won't really be driving sales until they put porn on there.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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
Who was it who said "Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to stupidity" ??
.. its sort of related
.. yep .. we got back 150 beautifully crafted floppy mailers. We had a pile there for a while with a sign that said "please take"
I know this is OT but hey
In the late '80s I was working in the R&D lab of a paper company. Part of our job was to get new grades of cardboard made into a standard sized box that we could smash to bits in a machine to see how well they lasted. As we got these boxes by the hundreds we just sent out designs to the manufacturing section to produce them, and deliver them back.
Well one day someone took the latest box design from some CAD drawings, saved it to a floppy, put it in a floppy mailer and sent it to the manufacturing department with a note attached saying "Make us 150 of these". I am sure you can all it coming head on
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm not sure about the exact duplicate part, but here's at least one Easter Egg targeted towards Soviet IC reverse engineers.
Just a little guy, y'know?
I saw the first 3 letters of the word "viagra" somewhere on my motherboard.....oh wait
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?