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Where's Waldo? Maybe On The Edge Of A Chip (02/11/99, 11:24 a.m. ET) By Craig Matsumoto, EE Times As former chip designer Willie McAllister tells it, the temptation is like having a fresh slab of wet cement at your feet. You discover a pocket of unused space, virgin territory for fresh metal lines on a chip. How could you resist carving your initials in the corner? "It's the same emotion. It's been going on since caveman days," McAllister said. And if you have a microscope powerful enough -- or, now, just a Web browser -- you can find these silicon successors to cave drawings. Once invisible, silicon artistry is being revealed to the world by Michael Davidson, whose website features some of the best available photographs of chip circuitry. Chip designers for years have been putting their initials on chips, the electronics engineer's version of "Kilroy was here." But finer geometries have opened the possibility of more sophisticated images, including cartoon characters, elaborate logos -- even a wedding announcement. Tucked into the inactive circuitry on unused corners of chips are all manner of friendly faces outlined in metal -- Mickey Mouse; Daffy Duck; even the elusive Waldo, hero of a string of children's books -- cheek by jowl with snakes, hummingbirds, California license plates, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. No one knows for sure how common these silicon doodles are, but Davidson -- a biophysicist at the optical microscopy division of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory -- is undertaking an active search to dig them up. "It's a way of saying you were here," said Kevin Kuhn, a mask designer at Silicon Graphics who admits to slipping Daffy Duck and Waldo onto the MIPS R4400 processor. "When we do these projects, they take one to three years from start to completion. It's really a big part of your life." Attracting Attention Davidson's abstract micrographs of "everything from beer and ice cream to microchips" have brought attention to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory program and actually make money for his lab at Florida State University. In one instance, millions of dollars in royalties came from beer micrographs that caught the eye of a New York necktie designer. Silicon chips have always held a particular fascination for Davidson, who believes the circuit layouts have an inherent artistry to them. In addition to the high-powered microscope, Davidson has an arsenal of lighting techniques he's been perfecting to magnify circuitry in stunning clarity. His work is hired out by companies such as Intel that want high-quality photographs of circuits. Davidson even began publishing calendars of his chip photos, and it was during a shoot in 1996 that he stumbled across, of all things, the hero of the Where's Waldo? cartoon books. "I was trying to focus, and I saw this really weird thing on there," he said. A little fiddling resolved the shape of Waldo's bespectacled face. "At first I thought it was a necessary part of the circuitry." The lab now actively searches for the doodles -- the latest find, in late January, was an outline of the state of Maine on a Fairchild Semiconductor chip -- but it's slow-going. Davidson's chip pool consists only of donations and old chips pried from scrap electronics. On top of that, a chip can take months to search. Daffy Duck's likeness was found weeks after Waldo's, even though both graced the same MIPS R4400 processor. Few designers have publicly fessed up to these drawings, but more have been coming out of the woodwork since October, when Davidson added the Silicon Zoo to his website, displaying some of the creatures he's found on-chip. Kuhn latched up with Davidson after finding his handiwork -- Daffy and Waldo -- on the site. The two have since struck up a fruitful partnership. In exchange for free silicon calendars, Kuhn's team drew an FSU logo onto the R12000. "Now we have the Seminoles on there," Davidson said. Having left chip design to help Hewlett-Packard design instruments for measuring properties of DNA, McAllister likewise admits to doodling. "It's a very normal thing for us to do," he said. "The thing most surprising to me is how people are interested in it." McAllister's works, also highlighted on Davidson's website, date from the 1980s, when Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP began the experiment of having engineers handle layout, which back then, included pencil-and-paper designing. That gave designers a more personal attachment to the chips. Natural Doodling "The more beautiful you could make the chip, the better it worked," he said. "Sometimes it looked like wallpaper, sometimes it looked like a flowing river. It was an odd thing, but the better it looked, the better it would work." Among McAllister's colleagues, every chip got a cartoon, selected about two weeks before the design went to the fab. The team would choose a picture, digitize it, and work on layout during lunch breaks. They didn't expect anyone else to see the doodles, but the news spread as people checking the masks or watching the chips being fabricated would discover the pictures amid the drab rectangles. "All of a sudden, these things would pop out and they'd remember your chip because of it," McAllister said. When visiting the fab, McAllister would be not just another engineer, but "the guy who drew the snake," status enough for him to get handshakes all around the shop. "It was like being a little folk hero for an hour," he said. McAllister's guess is chip doodling has faded out as the industry has turned more to outsourcing and foundry use. "A lot of people design chips now that they send to, say, an ASIC vendor. The designer has lost the connection to the physical substantiation," he said. Kuhn still numbers among the faithful, sneaking creatures onto each new MIPS processor. According to Davidson's site, the R12000 houses a whole jungle of them.
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