Considering the expense, precision and difficulty of manufacturing computer chips, you would think the engineers designing them are pretty serious people.

But it’s not all business inside a chip fab, as these microscope photos reveal. In fact, the designers of microchips frequently hide tiny cartoons, drawings and even messages alongside the super-tiny circuits and semiconductors they create.

Chipworks, a company that analyzes microchips by peeling them apart and looking at them under microscopes, has discovered many examples of silicon art. We’ve selected a few highlights here from the firm’s extensivegalleries of silicon art, but check the Chipworks website for more.

The images in this gallery are magnified 200 to 500 times.

As Chipworks explains, these drawings are made with the same processes used to assemble the rest of a computer chip. Designs are etched onto photolithography plates which are then used to “print” the chips’ circuitry, layer by layer, in thin films of silicon, silicon dioxide, aluminum and other materials. It’s a complicated process that takes hundreds of steps and millions of dollars worth of machinery, and it requires incredible degrees of precision and repeatability.

But if there’s a little unused space in a chip, why not fill that with an entertaining design? It’s not as if most of the chip companies’ customers will ever notice. The only people likely to see these designs are the chip engineers’ supervisors and analysts at companies like Chipworks.

“The mass production of these works of art as parasites on the body of a commercial IC goes unnoticed by most observers,” writes Chipworks. “Their existence is a tribute to human resourcefulness and creativity, surfacing from deep within a complex process.”

Full story: Gallery: Microscopic Art Hides Inside Computer Chips | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Silicon chips have billions of transistors in every square inch. But sometimes there’s enough room left over for chip engineers to insert a little joke.

While using a scanning electron microscope to examine the microcircuitry of a chip found in Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S phone, consulting company Chipworks discovered a surprise.

Underneath six layers of aluminum and silicon dioxide circuitry, almost at the level of the polysilicon wafer that underlies the entire chip, engineers concealed a tiny, tiny message.

Below the letters IFX (the stock symbol for Infineon, the company that makes the chip) is a tiny warning, made out of letters just two microns (2 µm) high:

IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE MUCH TOO CLOSE

“You would never find this message unless you were seriously looking for it,” says Chipworks marketing manager Rob Williamson.

The chip, the Infineon PMB5703, provides radio-frequency transmission and reception functions relating to the devices’ baseband and 3G features.

Chipworks has put many chips under the scanning electron microscope and has discovered dozens of hidden images and messages like this one. Constructed of the same materials as the chip’s circuitry — silicon dioxide, aluminum, copper and the like — the artwork can include cartoons, icons, or merely the initials of the chips’ designers.

In many cases, this artwork is not only tiny, it’s completely invisible unless you are disassembling the chip. Before it found this message, for instance, Chipworks had to delaminate the chip, layer by layer, putting each layer under the microscope. The purpose of that project was to understand the chip’s architecture, not to find hidden messages, but sometimes these Easter eggs pop out.

The makers of the Infineon PMB5703 must have had some extra time on their hands, because Chipworks found no less than four other images on the chip, including a smiley face, a drummer, a baby duck  called Calimero and a smiling dragon named Grisu.

Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet

Originally published as: Silicon Art Hidden Inside Samsung’s Galaxy Tab | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

It may be hard to believe as you read Wired on your iPad, but heating oil and metal plumbing pipes were hot tech topics just 100 years ago.

They were businesses, too, on which inventors pinned their hopes and corporations placed their bets in the form of factories, salesmen, and marketing budgets.

For a peek inside 100 years of cutting-edge inventions, take a look at this gallery of 20th-century advertisements. They show how products that we take for granted today, like bicycles, electric trains and radios, were once strange and wonderful enough that they needed bold, artistic introductions.

The posters, from an upcoming exhibition by the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association, show a century of massive change in technology, from plumbing to iPods. They also provide a glimpse of changing design trends: Bare-breasted beauties gave way to stark abstractions, which were succeeded by eye-catching color photos, which were replaced with primary-color silhouettes.

For more images and background, see the online  exhibit, titled “Innovations in Technology: From the Turn of the Century to Today.”

full story: Vintage Posters Highlight a Century of Innovation | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.