Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU 210
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.
A new record? (Score:5, Informative)
And here I was thinking this Slashdot story [slashdot.org] from exactly 2 years ago was a bit late...
Re:A new record? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mirror anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:A very cool site, but it's been around for a wh (Score:3, Informative)
huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Decent Mirror at Archive.Org (Score:4, Informative)
My favorites, The Buffalo [archive.org] and The Wright Brothers [archive.org]
Re:A very cool site, but it's been around for a wh (Score:5, Informative)
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blsux.htm [about.com]
Re:Copyright? (Score:2, Informative)
What sort of damages could one claim exactly?
Statutory damages for willful infringement range from $750 to $150,000 per work infringed, even if actual damages are $0.
Re:I've seen one of those..... (Score:2, Informative)
I managed to find all six. [blogger.com]
I actually used it in one of my paintings [blogspot.com].
- Kevin Stansell
Re:A new record? (Score:2, Informative)