Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet | Hacker News Reader

Hidden warning message found in Samsung’s Galaxy tablet

chipworks.com

161 pointsexch25 comments

Summary: "IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE MUCH TOO CLOSE" etched onto one of the internal chip's dies at a ridiculously small scale. Plus various other cartoon characters.

Edit: Yeesh, what's with the downvotes? I'm just providing a summary for other people who check the comments first, to catch the gist of an article quickly.

I didn't downvote, but the article really isn't that long, and contains pictures.

I like summary comments. They let me know if something's even remotely worth looking at before having to click through.

Considering the rather flamboyant and slightly misleading title of the article, I can see why a summary could be useful.

When most blog articles are so short, it's difficult not so see this as a sign of our lamentably dwindling attention spans. Some of the best articles are five thousand words or more! Putting summaries below five hundred word articles encourages a world where long form articles are perceived as laborious.

I can see the argument, but I disagree. What if I wasn't in the mood for humor / look at this cool thing? What if I were interested in legal troubles, and not pretty pictures?

Besides, the point of summary comments on short articles is to pre-filter, not post-filter. Without something like that, I have no way of knowing if it'll be a tweet or a novel, and at the time I didn't have time for much longer than a tweet.

I must protest. 2 microns is not ridiculously small. This, built by some former colleagues, is ridiculously small:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/july97/guitar.ltb.html

Though it is - god help me - nearly fifteen years old so presumably it is no longer that ridiculous. [1] These things probably ship inside every iPhone by now, or something.

Of course, none of this banter should lead you to conclude that the OP's chip art is any less than awesome. Remember, it's not the microscopicness of the equipment that matters, but how you use it. The colors are a very nice touch, for example.

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[1] And I'm not even going to talk about those AFM folks, or the self-assembled nanomaterials folks. They are just too ridiculous.

Those strings are fairly large compared to modern transistors. In September 2010, Hynix began mass producing 20 nm Class Technology 64 Gb NAND Flash - Hynix Press Release. This works out to ~20nm before the same pattern repeats compared to the 50 micron width of those strings.

1 micron is not cool. You know what's cool?

...a bicron?

Ice. Ice, baby.

Microprocessor easter eggs aren't new.

Here are some of the existing menagerie...

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/chipshots/dec/index.html

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html

And then there's the classic "VAX - When you care enough to steal the very best" that was etched (in Cyrillic) on the some of the MicroVAX chips:

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

From your VAX link - it was written in Cyrillic, because it was meant to be read by the inevitable Russian reverse-engineers. Russia lagged on chip design, so they stole US chip designs for their own computer industry, and told everybody they were original.

Interestingly, it's a word by word translation of the English phrase so it doesn't make any sense in Russian. I don't know if those reverse engineers would have guessed what it meant.

The cartoon chicken is Calimero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimero

This makes me wonder if they risk a copyright infringement lawsuit...

I think under fair use provisions this might count as de minimus.

And the dragon is Grisù: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gris%C3%B9_(serie_animata)

Both are Italian cartoons created by the Pagot brothers. Probably they have some fans among Samsung engineers :)

The dragon wants to become a firefighter =). It's an Italian cartoon and it was also popular in Germany.

It seems that there is no English wikipedia page for this one.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grisu,_der_kleine_Drache

To me this is a sign of healthy engineering and management team that's confident enough to have fun with what they're doing.

The man playing drums looks very much like Conan O'brien to me. Just saying.

a smiling hat-wearing hippo/dragon/whatever,

Aka grisu the firefighter.

and last but not least was some silicon art showing a baby duck

Aka Calimero.

Both popular series produced in the late 70s and shown in the 80s and 90s.

I wonder wheter I'm already too old or too young to know these..

Is it just my copy of Firefox, or does everyone have to manage to hover over and click on a 1x1 dot in order to change the images? Not very easy on a touchpad.

Seems like a "Previous | Next" UI would have been much easier to use.

In Chromium the thumbnails were something like 20×20.

It looks fine on my Firefox (a 4.0 nightly build).

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