http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/
Seen these before? How long has this been going on?
It has been going on since practically the begining of semiconductors. Not surprising really, for three reasons. One, many of the people involved with layout are artists (in fact it might be argued that any sufficiently complex form of technical design is as much a work of art as it is of engineering.) Two, it has kind of been a mark of acomplishment to make the smallest piece of art, remember the nanosized bull sculpture made recently? And thirdly, how better to truly personalize something then with a doodle? (I even seem to recall that one company was able to prove a case of design theft because the circuit layout that was stolen had a doodle that the stealing company stupidly left in the mask, but I can’t cite it, so it may be hightech legend.)
It’s also an easy way to tell if you have the layers on the chip aligned properly…
Saw it all the time when I worked, long ago, in a Motorola wafer fab. Eagles, corporate logos, random geometric designs…
shudder That job was suck. I got to sit and look through a microscope with a probe on it and zap little squares to test resistance on different layers. For 12 hours at a time.
It is, possibly, the most mind-numbing job on the face of the planet.
Nope…at least not in the semiconductor world. Knew a guy who had as part of his job, the duty of sitting down and using a specially modified scope to count the number of pits caused by etching on a four inch wafer. Luckily he only had to count them in two thin stripes, one horizontal and the other vertical. Normal numbers would be on the order of 16000 pits, would take him all day to do one stripe, and he’d have to do four or five wafers. (He then got to use that data after I ran a corelation program on it to calculate new etching chemicals and timings, but that still doesn’t mean part of his job didn’t suck.)