WEBVTT

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It's very rare.

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If you sat down and opened up maybe a hundred different ships, you might only find one.

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And maybe not even then.

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It definitely is like a treasure hunt.

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There's a lot of lows as you open them up and you don't see anything until you hit that high

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where you find the doodle.

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My name is Kenton and we are in my basement in Madison, Wisconsin.

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I open up chips to extract the silicon inside of them, mainly looking for chip art or chip

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graffiti, silicon doodles that have been left behind.

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My background is computer engineering, so I've always had a passion for computers and

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electronics in general.

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I didn't really know about silicon chips until me and some friends were walking home from

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some bars and I found a smashed cell phone on the ground.

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And I picked it up and one of the chips was exposed and I thought that's pretty cool.

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I brought it home and it looked at it under the microscope and that was sort of the catalyst

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that got me into this microscopic world.

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It took maybe 80 or so chips at that point and I opened one of them up and there was a

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smiley face inside on the silicon chip.

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It was literally an eye-opening moment.

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Completely unexpected.

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I had no idea it was going to be there.

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It really started the hunt for more.

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Once I've identified the chip that I want to open, it's clamping the chip into a vice

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and then heating it up with hot air which can be set somewhere around 350 to 400 degrees

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Celsius.

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Remove material and eventually you will expose the silicon inside.

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Maybe my favorite is it's a dump truck and it's dumping unused circuit parts on the

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chip.

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It's sort of comical and I really enjoy that one a lot.

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I'd say the majority of them are on the order of magnitude of 100 micrometers, so very,

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very microscopic.

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The biggest reason that people have given for what these are are that they are a way

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to sign their work to say I was here basically.

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Some might say we're archaeologists of sorts.

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A lot of these chips are being sold on eBay, for example, as scrap for gold recovery.

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There's always that worry in the back of my mind that some chips have already been lost

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and we'll never be able to see those again.

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But it is part of our history as a species, all these chips, all these different designs.

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We are in the technological age and so at least for me I think it's important to document

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these.

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Thank you.