Alliedassault - What art is hiding on your microchip?

I saw this over at Slashdot and thought it was quite cool so...........

[quote:424d0]
What art is hiding on your microchip?

More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs. In among the transistors and wire traces, he found something unexpected: Waldo.

"When I first saw him, he was upside-down, and I didn't recognize his face," the Florida-based cell biology researcher said.

Davidson suspected at first that the tiny design he saw was circular patterns added to the chip to thwart attempts by reverse-engineers to deduce its inner workings. But a second inspection showed it to be the characteristically hard-to-find character from the children's book series. "I realized, 'This is a doodle of some kind.' Then I started looking over the whole chip. I discovered Daffy Duck and other things on that chip," Davidson said.

That was just the start of a catalog that now holds more than 100 images of extremely small automobiles, dinosaurs, birds of prey, cartoon characters and even a wedding announcement silhouette--all tucked away among microchip circuits. Davidson calls the collection the Silicon Zoo.

After Davidson found Waldo, he and others started enthusiastically tearing apart Hewlett-Packard workstations and Digital Equipment Corp.'s Vax minicomputers from to find more. And when Davidson posted the images online, chip designers started sending him new samples, often challenging him to find the artwork without telling him what it was. Now he has more than 300 chips with unusual micrographic imagery.

[url=http://news.com.com/Whats+hiding+on+your+microchip/2100-1006_3-5893374.html:424d0]Full article[/url:424d0][/quote:424d0]

The dude's website: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/

[img]http://news.com.com/i/ne/p/2005/930siliconzoo1_490x290.jpg[/img][img]http://news.com.com/i/ne/p/2005/930siliconzoo6_288x491.jpg[/img]