Mike Davidson knows art when he sees it. But the senior research engineer at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University didn't expect to see any on the MIPS R4000 microchip he was photographing for his annual "chip shot" calendar. When he increased the magnification on his high power optical microscope to 600x, he found Waldo, the cartoon character of "Where's Waldo?" fame.
What started as a serendipitous discovery became a passion for Davidson, who collected the images he found on what became the Silicon Zoo Web site. When word about the site got around, design engineers from all over started sending Davidson chips, hoping to preserve their silicon creatures for posterity. Now the Zoo features Waldo along with another 300 pieces of what is variously termed chip art, artifacts or graffiti. The images (many of which are featured in the March article in IEEE Spectrum) include everything from chip designers' names, celebrity caricatures, and cartoon characters such as Dilbert and Hagar, to planes, trains, and automobiles.
The history of chip graffiti is as fascinating as the images themselves. Graffiti proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s because it served to thwart illegal copying of chip designs. But in 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act, which made an identical copy of a chip mask's working parts an automatic copyright violation, and graffiti no longer served a useful purpose.
Around the same time, product design cycles started to shrink, electronic design automation tools started to improve, and the whimsical designs that once got through were intercepted. Add to that the fact that some pieces of graffiti ruined the chips on which they were embossed. The upshot of these developments is that today's chip graffiti artists find themselves challenging both authority and technology when it comes to tagging their chips with these microscopic Mona Lisas.
Contact: Harry Goldstein, 312 419 7573, [email protected].For a faxed copy of the complete article ("The Secret Art of Chip Graffiti" by Harry Goldstein, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum, March 2002, pp. 50-55) or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
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