I must have been dreaming last night when I felt myself writing this post. Nonetheless, last night I was looking at Slashdot and followed some links through there about computer chip designers that make Silicon Art, or little tiny etchings on their computer chips, some of which are very original.
Michael Davidson started exploring the world of Silicon Art ten years ago, and helped to build the database of chip images that is the Silicon Zoo. Davidson and others use the process of Microscopy to find the hidden images.
Since the Molecular Expressions website is pretty thick, I though I’d give you an outline of the process here.
“…Most chips are packaged in ceramic packages that hide the integrated circuit behind a brass or ceramic cover plate. The first step is removal of the cover plate designed to protect the microprocessor from mechanical damage and humidity. This is done with a scalpel or on a mill to expose the underlying integrated circuit for photomicrography…”
“…We usually scan the entire chip at low (2.5x to 5x) magnification to identify areas most likely to contain the silicon creatures. 
These areas are usually found in the voids between registers and caches or near the bonding pads, but many chips also have a “signature” area where the type of chip, designer credits, and company logo are displayed…”
“…After a thorough examination of the surface, we will rotate the microscope nosepiece into higher magnification for a first pass at photography of the creatures. Most of the creatures vary in size from 20 to 200 microns, which will fill the frame of a 35 millimeter camera using 20x to 60x objectives…”
This image was found on the pad ring of an AMD integrated circuit. This is an ISDN chip that is still in use today as AMD part number AM79c30.
Some other images that I really liked were:
………………….The Bulldozer 
………………………A Crayon 
………………………The Cheetah For a full list of Silicon Art creatures, click here to visit Silicon Zoo and then scroll to the bottom.