[blam]

Yup. DavemeisterP's should be dated the 16th?

Here's a true story:

In the late 70's, the CIA discovered a Soviet sonobuoy that had washed ashore near the Puget Sound in Washington State. The Bangor Naval Submarine Base is located within the Sound and the sonobuoy was apparently used by the Soviets to track the movement of our submarines.

Anyway, I know about this story because the CIA came to TI inquiring about how one of our chips may have found its way into that sonobuoy. We reverse-engineered it and determined that it was a copy but, the CIA wasn't satisfied with that answer because "why would the Soviets include a TI logo on the chip."

We couldn't answer that either but after checking around we found that there had been prior incidents with the Soviets copying our chips and leaving off the logo. After that prior incident, our designers began to incorporate the TI logo as a functional part of the design. The Soviets soon caught onto this and from then on, copied everything exactly, including (the now necessary) logo.

BTW, FYI, there are empty spaces on some chips and the designers often times use this empty space to put graffiti, comments or random pictures. The Japanese designers would often put Samurai warriors while the Texans would put cowboys in the empty spaces.

Chip Art

[blam]

Hmmmm. Silicon Art was more widespread than I realized.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks blam, interesting account.

This is disappointing :’)

http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/chipshot.asp

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I had heard about this but could never see the stuff...

[mad_as_he$$]

I worked for a photolithography company for many years. I have seen hundreds of works of “art” on wafers. Too bad much of it was in scribe lines so it was destroyed when the wafer was sectioned up.

[SunkenCiv]

A 2004 thread, very interesting and pertinent (given the Stuxnet thing), with this link leading to an interesting sidebar by blam:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1071087/posts?page=54#54

and a new, similar topic:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2594959/posts

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 02/03/2004. Thanks Valin. See the "in reply to" link for blam's additional story. Just an update for the GGG list, and I thought I'd ping The Usual Suspects instead.