Well, as long as we’re talking about shmoo variants, I’l bet few of you knew this. In silicon evaluation, there’s a kind of measurement that you can make. It’s really a bunch of measurements where two physical parameters are allowed to vary between two ranges. A tool checks to see if the silicon is ‘GOOD’ or ‘BAD’ at each variant combination and creates a sort of map or plot of the ‘GOOD’ regions and the ‘BAD’ regions. In the map, ‘GOOD’ is represented as an asterisk and ‘BAD’ is represented as a space. The outputs tend to look rather lumpy and nondescript (unless you know what to look for). Legend has it that the first guy to generate one of these plots was looking at it, trying to make sense of what it was telling him about the silicon performance when his buddy walked up behind him and asked, “What the hell is that? It looks like a shmoo!” To which the creator replied, “That’s what I’ll call it; a shmoo plot.”
They are actually a very useful tool for silicon evaluation, but you really have to have a good intuition to know how to read them and figure out where the interesting anomalies are.
Now there’s some trivia you can really use!