Sorry about the pithy title – and don’t worry if you are the proud owner of one of these devices because this warning is purely tongue in cheek. Read on to know why . . .
When tearing apart a recent Samsung Galaxy tablet, we came across an Infineon device that really set itself apart from the crowd. The featured device is Infineon’s PMB5703, which has had design wins in both the Galaxy phone and tablet (among others). This device is an impressive single chip, dual-mode RF transceiver IC, with integrated baseband functionality and 3G digRF standard interface. By making the digital part independent from the RF implememtation, it removes the need for an additional baseband IC.
But, impressive specifications aside, what caught our collective eye was the imaginatively cool silicon art we found when examining the die markings. The playful designs were deemed worthy enough to make it into our Silicon Art Gallery and contradict the typical no-nonsense typecast attributed to German circuit designers.
| Finding the silicon art Before we found the silicon designs, we started with the Samsung Captivate Galaxy S phone. We tore it apart, and found on the main circuit board the packaged Infineon PMB5703. The same device was also found in the Samsung Galaxy tablet. |
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Finding the silicon art (continued)Optical examination of the die showed lots of silicon art. Since we were doing some scanning electron microscopy on it as well, we decided to show our favorite piece of “art” in that higher magnification format.
“If you can read this, you are much too close.”To put this entertaining warning into perspective, the “o” in the word “you” is 1.5 µm x 2.0 µm, while the average human hair measures around 25 µm in diameter. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometre). At right, we are including a low resolution image of the whole die, and remind the reader that you can click on any of the images to enlarge them. |
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| Other artwork on the device We’ re used to seeing one or sometimes two pieces of art on some devices, but these guys went a little crazy. The first is a fairly simple smiley face found near the edge of the die and frankly, on comparison to the other pieces, it is a little bush league. The next images are more impressive, showing a man playing the drums, a smiling hat-wearing hippo/dragon/whatever, and last but not least was some silicon art showing a baby duck (that perhaps just hatched out of a shell or has a bad bowl-cut).New information – we received an email and apparently the dragon is the cartoon character Grisu (www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSSlyihXfoE&feature=related) and the duck is a cartoon character named Calimero (www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSSlyihXfoE&feature=related). I don’t actually recommend going to the latter link because the theme song will be stuck in your head all day. Thanks for the information Mattia. |
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We have always enjoyed posting our silicon art, and have generally done so with little fanfare. This one, however, deserved more accolades.
