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.

Quite Ammusing

[Kickboy12]

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.

Re:Quite Ammusing

[Krach42]

Careful! The ESRB would revoke your rating, then it would get marked as AO, and your chips could only be sold to people over the age of 18.

Try explaining at 16 to your dad that he need to go buy you that chip because you can't buy it yourself because there's a 1:10000 scale penis on it.

Re:Quite Ammusing

[Baddas]

You mean a very, very tiny penis... Remember that these are micro or nano scale features.

Re:Quite Ammusing

[gerardlt]

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.

We can only hope!

A new record?

[Seehund]

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...

Re:A new record?

[Seehund]

Yeah, I thought the one from 1998 felt a bit dated too.

I've often had the feeling

[mctk]

that Alice and her fist of death are hiding on my cpu.

The article is absolutely true.

[deft]

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.

And everything old is new, again.

[porkchop_d_clown]

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.

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

[Shanep]

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".

The key to success

[3770]

This won't really be driving sales until they put porn on there.

Re:Not new but still fun

[OzPeter]

Who was it who said "Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to stupidity" ??

I know this is OT but hey .. its sort of related

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 .. 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've seen one of those.....

[ndruw1]

I saw the first 3 letters of the word "viagra" somewhere on my motherboard.....oh wait

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

[rob_squared]

Unfortunately, it's a hoax:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blsux.htm

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.