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Ken Shirriff

Tiny thumbs-up in the Pentium P5. I found this hidden chip art after removing two layers of metal from the chip. (I don't know who JNL is.)

 An extreme close-up of a chip die. On top of a metal line are the initials "JNL". On either side, a hand (in metal) is making a thumbs-up sign.
22 comments
Chris Harrington ☕✨

@kenshirriff Oh ... gosh. Thank goodness the P5 was released 6 years prior to a certain shock website

Graham Spookyland🎃/Polynomial

@kenshirriff "thumbs up" is not the first thing I thought of upon seeing this

Whiskers

@kenshirriff At a different scale and from a different era I etched my initials onto the distortion pedal circuit I built in high school in the early 1970s 😀 #germanium #fuzz #chipart

David Blume

@kenshirriff Love that. Almost as much as I love that RealTek's never upgraded their original ugly PCB-style crab thing logo.

I imagine they have a budget sheet they approve every year, and it's got this line item:

Refresh corporate logo......0元

Ralph058 (S/he/it) AF4EZ

@kenshirriff 800nm min feature size. That would be the dots on the fingernails.

Keith Purtell

@kenshirriff You're sure those are not quantum transistors?

Stuart Marks

@kenshirriff The Stanford MIPS project (precursor to MIPS Computer Systems) had a VLSI layout that included artwork of the cartoon Road Runner with a trailing cloud of dust. I remember Arturo Salz telling me that the artwork caused the design rule checker to fail, so he had to toggle random pixels until it passed! I believe this chip layout is on page 26 of this TR, but the image is too lossy to see the cartoon. 😞 infolab.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/

spmatich :blobcoffee:

@kenshirriff the silicon equivalent of “Kilroy was here”

Max™

@kenshirriff I hate the Internet so much for making me think that was something horrible at first glance

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