Silicon Doodles & Microchip Art

Back in the earlier days of microchips, the designers would sometimes add tiny images to the chips, for fun. From NPR:

Many of the doodles came from engineers who weren’t doing it for an audience.

“We did it for ourselves,” said Willy McAllister, a retired electrical engineer who worked for more than a decade at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and helped craft a chip with the sleek image of a cheetah on it. “Nobody ever expected it to be cracked open 10 years later and marveled at. That was never the point.”

The cheetah was picked as a visual representation for an HP project code named after the world’s fastest land animal.

And from a recent NY Times story:

“They were the maverick days, like the early days of flying,” Mr. John said. “At that time, it could do no harm to the chip, so it was purely creative expression.”

Mr. John tried, with mixed results, to recreate a yacht from the period’s Old Spice advertisements. Another colleague who was thin drew elaborate muscles. The doodles were drawn with a chip design tool.

The most important reason behind the covert graffiti, Mr. John added, was for the doodles to say: “I’m signing my name on this chip, so it’s got to mean something.”

You can find many more microchip doodles at Silicon Zoo.

Tags: art

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