When Michael W. Davidson settled into his workday at Florida State University’s Optical Microscope Laboratory in the late 1990s, his view typically involved crystalline images of DNA structures and hormone molecules – complex, elegant, and purely scientific. But one day, curiosity nudged him in a new direction. While looking at their complex circuitry and thousands of transistors, he noticed a familiar face staring back at him, one that he had seen in many children’s books before…there he was, the illusive Mr. Waldo!
This discovery inspired him to frantically start searching for more chip art, and by 1999, word was out that the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at FSU was looking at microchips. With this, Davidson started a page called the “Silicon Zoo,” where he started to classify and show the discoveries that he found in chips made during the 70s and 80s. These art pieces were originally signatures by the chip makers (engineers) to show who made them and in case of copyright infringement, be able to demonstrate that this was the intellectual property of the company they work for.
This expanded to an underground art form where engineers decided to hide little hardware easter eggs. Because of the way the chips were made, they would not take any extra resources, and the engineers knew where to put them to not affect the work of the chip itself. From the Saturday Night Live Land Shark bit, to Pomeranian dogs, to the state of Texas, to camels, to cheetahs on fast chips and elephants on memory chips, this art form had a wide range of ways of appearing.
These tiny masterpieces were never intended to be found. They were jokes, passions, and personal touches left behind by engineers who assumed no one would ever break into the electronic and zoom in far enough to notice.
For example, Richard Kerr made chips at Qualcomm starting in the mid-80s. His first piece of art was inspired by his then-4-year-old son, Jesse, who wanted to help him design the chips. “Well, he was into trucks at the time, so I designed a little ’56 Chevy pickup truck,” Kerr said during an NPR interview (referenced in the bibliography below). As microscopes have become more accessible, there has been a new social media trend of “chip hunters,” people who collect vintage chips in search of these incredible microscopic art pieces.
Because of their rarity, it has become difficult to verify the existence of various chip art, creating the rise of counterfeit chip art like the fake “Bill Sux” referring to Bill Gates – which was proven to be a hoax and turned out to be photoshopped image on a chip.
These art pieces are a reminder of how art and technology go hand in hand, that the “A” (art) belongs in S.T.E.A.M. (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), and that these hand-crafted objects show the mark of engineers who want to express themselves. Michael Davidson, in 2014, helped Nobel Prize Laureate Eric Betzig to develop super resolution microscopy shortly before his passing later that year.
Explore the Instagram of a chip hunter that finds the art hidden within these vintage chips: https://www.instagram.com/evilmonkeyzdesignz/.