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Leaving their mark

Chip designers `sign' work microscopically

When Michael Davidson first started photographing silicon chips through a microscope 10 years ago, he wanted "to promote circuitry as an art form." Four years ago, his microscope excavated another kind of art from the microprocessor's metallic layers: a drawing of Where's Waldo.

"At first, I thought it was an example of reverse engineering," said Davidson, a research scientist with the Natural Magnetic High Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Fla.

In fact, he had come across a long-standing, clandestine practice of chip designers: impressing a microscopic, non-functional cartoon or drawing into the surface of the chip. Since then, Davidson has photographed more than 60 chip designs.

In December, he made his gallery of photomicrographs, including images of lizards, buffaloes, cartoon characters and the space shuttle, available through his laboratory's Web site (http://microscopy.fsu.edu).

"We all did it," said Dan Zuras, a chip designer at Hewlett-Packard who has two designs on the site.

Typically, the designs were etched into the uppermost, metallic layers of the chip, creating the impression of an image in relief on the chip's surface. The cartoons grew out of the ritual of having designers sign or initial the chips they had worked on.

For example, Zuras drew a roadrunner on a then-fast Hewlett-Packard 1AK9 chip in 1982. "Back in those days, I knew where every one of the 153,000 transistors were on the chip. I knew it so well that I signed it, like writing your name in wet concrete after you've poured a driveway."

Other chips featured inside jokes or references. One of Davidson's favorites is The Con Artist, a drawing of a shady peddler hawking contraband watches, chosen because, according to chip designers at Hewlett-Packard, the company had used inferior clock circuitry on the low-cost microprocessor.

Larry Johnson, a chip designer, once contributed a drawing of his chow Nikki to a MIPS Technologies chip, the R4000. "I've never seen a chip with more graffiti on it. There must have been 100 pieces, mostly names and initials."

So why did he draw Nikki? "Well, I loved her."

Alas, some chip companies, like Intel, have banned the chip graffiti because the designs can interfere with the checking process.