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The hidden art inside microchips
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 10th March 2008
This image of Thor was taken by Molecular Expressions from a Hewlett-Packard graphics chip.
The Molecular Expressions team has spent quite a few years building up a digital zoo of hidden artwork on common microchip designs. The images are so small that they are only visible via photomicrography – literally, the use of a microscope to take photographs.
There's some pretty impressive stuff hidden away in your CPU and GPU, too. Swords, migrating buffalo, a smurf, and the Playboy Bunny even makes an appearance.
Although the artwork is mostly used as a way for chip designers to show off their talents and stamp their individuality onto a chip, they can also serve a more serious purpose. Should a competitor copy your design and make their own, the artwork would be duplicated at the same time. Make the artwork personal to you or your company and you've got a sure-fire way of proving that the design is original to you.
I'll warn you now: the site is addictive. With so many images to hand, and with fascinating back stories for most, you can get yourself lost in the Lilliputian world of processor microphotography. Either that, or I need to get out more.
Do you know of any hidden designs in common components that aren't listed on the site, or perhaps you had no idea such things existed? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Comments (19)
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I was looking at these last year, absolutely fascinating.
A big phallus? sorry
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
You have no idea. I used to work for the guy that owns this website out at Florida State University and all the sections of his website look different and no matter how much we argued with him we couldn't get him to let us update the look because the site is so massive and is so poorly arranged it would have broken it. Not to mention he refuses to build the site in anything but HTML in notepad because its the only code he knows.
yeah it works and is fast... I hate all these moden flash websites
Joe
This I saved from ZD Net a couple of years ago ... http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5893374.html?tag=nl.e589
The trick was to put the right one in the right kind of chip.
You didn't think the micro-circuitry really did the magic did you?
Why do you think we are seeing hotter internals since we "obtained" those mesopotamian cylinder seals?
Just doin my part to slip one more meme into the zeitgeist.
The closer you look, the more you see.
Some stuff is observable only by using an Electron Scanning Microscope.
Almost nothing is what is seems, and it has been that way long enough that one may as well say "forever", which is actually incalculable, but perhaps less than a nine hundred ninety thousandth of a microsecond in postulated existance.
The real interesting stuff is located in the subterranean labrynth between T.I. Dallas, and Varo Semi-conductor, and all the small labs in Garland which extend an unknown distance beyond both horizontally and vertically downward.
But we shouldn't speak of that.