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Silicon Zoo: Tiny artwork on CPU dies
- mauriciolange 5y agoMy first thought was that the site has died (gone off-line)
- zarzavat 5y agoTitle is a Garden path sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- victorbstan 5y agoLearned something today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Wildgoose 5y agoI'm fascinated by your comment because I mentally parsed it correctly from the start. I presume you hadn't heard of a CPU die before? I'm not sure how else this could be misunderstood on an initial read.
- mauriciolange 5y agoI am well aware of CPU dies. But as I wrote that first sentence I read it "bad" from your perspective! I correlate much stronger "dies" with death than with a die.
- samstave 5y ago....except when I see it literally next to the term, CPU....
- nothatscool 5y agoMost of the posts here with “dies” in the title are about public figures who have died. If you are used to those and are scanning through the posts it is easy to read “dies” in that context first and then the rest of the sentence.
- nonameiguess 5y agoThey might actually both be true. A sibling comment seems to indicate they don't do this any more and the main gallery page hasn't been updated in four years. It's possible that the project to put artwork on CPU dies has died, though the webpage hosting the gallery has clearly not died.
- colejohnson66 5y agoIf you're a visual learner, Tom Scott made a great video about these "Crash Blossoms": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldT2g2qDQNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldT2g2qDQNQ
- ismaildonmez 5y agoYou have the best nick ever, hats off
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 5y agoMaybe we should have the black bar up on hacker news today.
- gcheong 5y agoMine was of some kind of simulation running that “died”. Like a Tamagochi or something. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi)
- kgwxd 5y agoMine was that the practice of putting art on CPUs has died.
- jhgb 5y agoThe comment by tverbeure justifies your belief.
- DavidSJ 5y agoMine was that the art itself had died.
- gitgud 5y agoThis resolution must be orders of magnitudes better now, maybe they're just harder to find...
- timw4mail 5y agoI think there's just less room for extra stuff on a die.
- michaelt 5y agoWe fit more stuff on dies than ever before - If a ThreadRipper has space for 64 cores and 256 MB of L3 cache, it has room for a microscopic picture of a bird.
- timw4mail 5y agoYou are kind of proving my point: room for artwork can't be at the expense of the stuff that actually does work.
- jaguar1878 5y agoI think it has more to do with design rules for metal layers. Between the rules for: min area, max area, min density, max density, and density gradient it can be tough to get artwork to be manufacturable, even if you have the space for it. No one wants to risk poor yields because of the art.
- Linda703 5y ago[dead]
- boredumb 5y agoRIP
- timw4mail 5y agoNow I want to know if there is artwork corresponding to CPU code names: Bulldozer and Piledriver, while not the best performing chips, certainly have a clear visual image to their names.
- rjsw 5y agoIntel could just do a map of the location of each code name within the outline of whichever state it is from.
- spijdar 5y agoAre there any recent examples of chip art like this? I'm not seeing anything from the 2000s or 2010s, and it's a little sad to think it died out.
- Pathogen-David 5y agoThe RP2040 released last year has a little Raspberry Pi logo https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/29/die-shots-of-the-raspberry-pi-rp2040-chip-teardown-dieshot-reverseengineering-piday-johndmcmaster-raspberry_pi/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/29/die-shots-of-the-raspbe...
- ranma42 5y agoI know of at least one GDDR5 memory chip that should have chip art of a snake on the die.
- boothby 5y agoSadly, the chip art I'm responsible for is not public. But yeah, folks still do this.
- tverbeure 5y agoStory time! 28 years ago, I worked for Mietec, a company that had a fab that is now owned by OnSemi. The mask preparation team told me the following: One time they received the GDS2 file with the mask layers (that’s the golden file that gets created when you do a tape-out) from a customer, did their usual preparation and design rule checks, and sent it to the mask maker. A few days later, they received an email stating that they couldn’t process the file due to “the presence of twitty birds and Christmas trees.” And, indeed, upon closer inspection, the design contained these elements. However the metal vias to make those images were only on one layer, and not connected to others. The resulting issue was one of “floating vias”. (That’s the exact wording that I remember all these years later, but Google doesn’t turn up anything.) For some reason, these unconnected vias couldn’t be held in place during some steps of either the mask masking process or the actual silicon production step, and that’s why the mask maker rejected it. A new guideline was issued by my company that designs should not have these kind of graphic elements and logos to avoid wasting engineering resources on something frivolous. What I don’t understand is why this issue wasn’t detected during design rule checking at the customer’s site or at our mask making preparation stage. But that’s a different story. Either way: I’ve worked on a lot of chips and for a bunch of different companies, and I’m not aware of there being any graphical elements in them either. Masks were moderately expensive 28 years ago (something like $25k), they’re insanely expensive today (millions.) You don’t want to risk anything…
- jjoonathan 5y agoI've been out of touch for a while -- what's the driving factor in mask expense these days? Time in the mask writer? Something about only being able to pack so many simultaneous electron beams next to each other before they fuzz out?
- tverbeure 5y agoI can't offer you any more insights other than "it's expensive to make things that are just a few nanometer in size..."
- stormbrew 5y agoIt's really wild to me that there isn't a market out there for smaller chip manufacturers at larger feature scales to still do production orders in that price range or cheaper even. Or, if there are, they're hard to find and get access to. Lots of chips in use today are still not anywhere near the tiny end of the scale, and they're clearly still being manufactured somewhere, but it's like economies of scale have somehow worked against price in IC manufacturing in some ways (but obviously not others: per-feature-count is obviously much more cost effective now).
- tverbeure 5y agoSecond story! A former manager used to work for the Vax silicon team. For the youngster: the Vax was a very popular mini computer in the eighties. It was also copied by the evil communists on the other side of the iron curtain. So the engineers put a message on the die, in Cyrillic: “Vax, when you care enough to steal the very best.” When they found out about it, management wasn’t totally happy about it, but it didn’t go any further than “do don’t this again.” https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
- sibrahim 5y agoSometimes these are officially sanctioned and even required! Most notably, including logos/other embellishments are a form of "trap street" where the idea is to have something to point to that trivially proves someone is using your mask design if it comes to it.
- verdverm 5y agoWhen I worked at an IBM Fab, I remember seeing these during inspection under the 1000000x microscope. There were many, I wondered if each engineer had their own they'd embed. Both were impressive!