Published Tuesday, February 9, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News

The incredible shrinking art

BY MICHAEL STROH
Baltimore Sun

MICHAEL Davidson was peering through his microscope at the tiny landscape of a silicon microchip when he saw it: a boy's face nestled among the millions of tiny transistors. And he could swear the boy was smiling.

He closed his eyes, opened them again and pumped up the magnification.

No, he wasn't imagining things. It was Waldo -- the elusive hero of the ``Where's Waldo?'' children's book series -- his familiar smirk a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair.

Although he didn't know it at the time, Davidson had stumbled onto the Lascaux Cave of the computer industry: a secret cache of microscopic doodles buried inside computer chips around the globe and known only to the small priesthood of bunny-suited engineers and technicians who created them.

``It really freaked me out because I'd never seen anything like it before,'' Davidson recalled. ``I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if it was necessary to the circuit of the chip.''

Since uncovering Waldo three years ago, he's spotted dozens of other doodles: cartoon legends such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Dilbert; film stars such as Groucho Marx; and a barnyard of mustangs, pit vipers and longhorn steers.

Who created these fantastic images and why? Davidson found out in the fall when he created an online gallery of microscopic Monets called ``the Silicon Zoo'' at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/roadrunner.html.

Soon after the Web site opened, some of the chip engineers who had created the images -- employing the same basic techniques used to lay out the chip's transistors and street-like circuit patterns -- began sending him e-mail, explaining the history of their drawings or pointing him to others yet undiscovered.

Among those who 'fessed up was Dan Zuras, a 45-year-old chip designer at Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto whose first contribution to the Silicon Zoo is an image of the Road Runner. ``I never thought I'd be alive when someone found it,'' said the longtime South San Jose resident.

Zuras said he spent nearly two weeks tattooing the Road Runner into a sliver of silicon that became an H-P math processor. The year was 1982, and this was his first solo design. At the time, the chip was the fastest of its kind, hence his decision to stamp it with the Road Runner.

``I spent two years of my life on that chip,'' Zuras said. ``It's like a painter. When you're proud of your work, you sign it.''

He squeezed the cartoon into an unused corner of the chip.

With a children's coloring book as his guide, Zuras traced the Road Runner into the design on his workstation. Later, the complete blueprint -- including the famous bird -- was used to create each thumbnail-size microchip.

Since then, chip design has become a more complex process involving far more people, making microscopic artwork imprinting more difficult and less personally gratifying. Still, Zuras in the mid-'80s worked on two additional chips decorated with microscopic art -- one with a panther and one with a cheetah -- and now once again he has a chance of putting his imprint on a chip that is largely his own creation.

Zuras is working at H-P Labs today -- not in one of the company's computer divisions -- and that's giving him the opportunity to co-design a chip that captures high-speed data from analytical chemistry equipment. He figures he will complete the yearlong project in April, then stamp the chip with a Greek sigma -- a capital E -- if he can persuade another engineer working on another part of the chip to actually make the imprint.

What if H-P bans the practice, as it subsequently did in the computer division in the late '80s?

``I wouldn't quit,'' Zuras said.

The mystery of microchip graffiti really caught the imagination of Davidson, a former Florida State University biophysicist who now makes his living photographing a variety of invisible worlds, then selling the images through his company, Molecular Images.

Using a $30,000 Nikon optical microscope with a built-in camera, he has captured the internal structures of things from moon rocks to Fuzzy Navel cocktails. His photos hang on the walls of the Smithsonian and the haberdashery racks of Bloomingdale's, where a neckwear maker uses his booze shots to adorn its Cocktail Collection ties.

A digital archaeologist, the 48-year-old Davidson spends weekends shucking chips from their black epoxy shells like a diver looking for pearls. He figures he explores 50 chips for each image he finds.

A complicated doodle may require designers to fool their own computers because the software used to create chips is programmed to spot design flaws and often balks at odd angles.

But there's a good reason for trying. Unlike the music or film business, the computer industry has long prized anonymity. Few industry superstars receive acclaim for their work -- so creative minds resort to stealth.

The creators of the first Apple Macintosh had their names scrawled on the inside of every plastic hood. Atari programmers were famous for hiding secret messages called ``Easter eggs'' in their games. The messages, usually a list of the game's creators, were revealed only when players executed a specific sequence of moves. Easter eggs survive throughout the software business today.

Although no one knows exactly when micro-doodling started, it appears to be almost as old as the microchip itself. Davidson, for example, said he discovered a crude image of a sailboat on a Texas Instruments chip that ``couldn't be newer than 1970 or '71.''

Over the years, engineers have immortalized their nicknames, girlfriends' names, license plates and favorite cartoon characters -- sometimes all at once. Davidson has found as many as 100 on a single chip.

Other discoveries are stranger still.

As a wedding present for a colleague who had just tied the knot, designer Kevin Kuhn etched profiles of the happy couple into a microprocessor -- a lasting if not very obvious tribute.

``It's not so much what you draw, it's the fact that you can do it. To be able to draw something so small . . . it's just kind of amazing,'' said Kuhn, who works at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View.

Others have used the medium for good-spirited ribbing or revenge. After a friendly argument with a colleague, one engineer got back at his buddy by inscribing the message: ``If you have any trouble with this chip, call . . .'' and filling in his buddy's name and home phone number. The phone never rang.

Sometimes these artistic urges can lead to trouble. Engineers tell tales of would-be Rembrandts who short out a chip's circuity, causing it to malfunction.

As a result, some firms are less tolerant of impulse art than others. Davidson said he's never found a doodle on a chip made by the two American giants, Intel and Motorola, or on any Japanese chip. An Intel spokesman said its engineers may sign a chip only with their initials.

``Very often, management doesn't approve of this kind of thing,'' Zuras said. ``It can grate on their nerves.''

In the end, however, management may not have to worry. As microprocessors become more complex, so has the software used to design them. As a result, it's getting harder and harder to include cartoons.

But dedicated chip artists promise to carry on the tradition. ``People will find a way to do it, one way or the other,'' Kuhn said.