It's very rare.
If you sat down and opened up maybe a hundred different ships, you might only find one.
And maybe not even then.
It definitely is like a treasure hunt.
There's a lot of lows as you open them up and you don't see anything until you hit that high
where you find the doodle.
My name is Kenton and we are in my basement in Madison, Wisconsin.
I open up chips to extract the silicon inside of them, mainly looking for chip art or chip
graffiti, silicon doodles that have been left behind.
My background is computer engineering, so I've always had a passion for computers and
electronics in general.
I didn't really know about silicon chips until me and some friends were walking home from
some bars and I found a smashed cell phone on the ground.
And I picked it up and one of the chips was exposed and I thought that's pretty cool.
I brought it home and it looked at it under the microscope and that was sort of the catalyst
that got me into this microscopic world.
It took maybe 80 or so chips at that point and I opened one of them up and there was a
smiley face inside on the silicon chip.
It was literally an eye-opening moment.
Completely unexpected.
I had no idea it was going to be there.
It really started the hunt for more.
Once I've identified the chip that I want to open, it's clamping the chip into a vice
and then heating it up with hot air which can be set somewhere around 350 to 400 degrees
Celsius.
Remove material and eventually you will expose the silicon inside.
Maybe my favorite is it's a dump truck and it's dumping unused circuit parts on the
chip.
It's sort of comical and I really enjoy that one a lot.
I'd say the majority of them are on the order of magnitude of 100 micrometers, so very,
very microscopic.
The biggest reason that people have given for what these are are that they are a way
to sign their work to say I was here basically.
Some might say we're archaeologists of sorts.
A lot of these chips are being sold on eBay, for example, as scrap for gold recovery.
There's always that worry in the back of my mind that some chips have already been lost
and we'll never be able to see those again.
But it is part of our history as a species, all these chips, all these different designs.
We are in the technological age and so at least for me I think it's important to document
these.
Thank you.