Where's Waldo? (Darkfield)

Where's Waldo?

Just about everyone we know has spent time searching for Waldo in the comic strips (and we have too!). The photomicrograph above illustrates a wireframe rendition of Waldo that we found hiding on the surface of a microprocessor integrated circuit. Discovering this version of Waldo proved to be much more difficult than the one in the comics. When searching the Sunday comic strip, you have to screen several hundred faces to find the real Waldo hiding, usually in a crowd, behind a building or in a corner. We caught this silicon version of Waldo (that is about 30 microns in size) hiding among caches, buses, and registers while searching through many thousands of square microns of complex circuitry with a high-power optical microscope. Waldo is the first Silicon Creature that we discovered, and this led to an exhaustive search for more creatures and construction of the Silicon Zoo gallery.

View this silicon artwork under differential interference contrast and brightfield illumination.


© 1995-2022 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved. No images, graphics, software, scripts, or applets may be reproduced or used in any manner without permission from the copyright holders. Use of this website means you agree to all of the Legal Terms and Conditions set forth by the owners.
This website is maintained by our
Graphics & Web Programming Team
in collaboration with Optical Microscopy at the
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Last modification: Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004 at 03:30 PM
Access Count Since May 29, 2000: 28381