Chip Art

Chip art, also called silicon art, chip graffiti, or silicon doodling, consists of microscopic drawings and inscriptions incorporated into integrated circuits. Because chips are made by photolithography, adding patterns to unused areas does not require extra manufacturing steps. The designs range from engineers’ initials to detailed pictures, jokes, and references to a chip’s purpose; they can only be seen under a microscope. Before a 1984 change in US copyright law automatically protected semiconductor chip layouts, matching doodles could help show that a competitor had copied a design rather than created it independently. That made the artwork a kind of hardware watermark, a role it largely lost once exact copying became a copyright violation.

The art draws on the colors and textures produced by layers of silicon, glass-like silicon dioxide, and aluminum, and often reflects designers’ pride in their work. Some images are personal, functional, or satirical, while alleged examples can also be fabricated: a widely circulated image of “bill sux” on a Pentium chip is a hoax. Semiconductor companies generally discourage unnecessary artwork because they fear it could disrupt a chip’s function or design process. At the same time, researchers and artists have turned chip micrographs into books, exhibitions, and online galleries, including a collection of more than 1,700 images related to BioMEMS.