(This is an edited repost of an article I wrote for kwak attack, a collaborative blog.)

Waldo is pretty bad at hiding. Even small children can easily find him in his various books. Observe:

He's right there in the middle for fuck's sake

This quote from The Silicon Zoo gallery explains why their site exists.

"When searching the Sunday comic strip, you have to screen several hundred faces to find the real Waldo hiding, usually in a crowd, behind a building or in a corner. We caught this silicon version of Waldo (that is about 30 microns in size) hiding among caches, buses, and registers while searching through many thousands of square microns of complex circuitry with a high-power optical microscope. Waldo is the first Silicon Creature that we discovered, and this led to an exhaustive search for more creatures and construction of the The Silicon Zoo gallery."

Silicon Waldo

That's right: The Silicon Zoo gallery contains hundreds of images that appear on microcircuitry (with enlightening and often hilarious comments), photographed with microscopes, ranging from simplistic 10 micron long planes to elaborate renditions of the ancient god of thunder, Thor.

A 10 micrometer jet
Mighty Thor!

The designers are, of course, geeks, as should be evident from the various pop culture references, horrible puns and boyish delight these images exude. Witness these two gems from a Hewlett-Packard math processor:

Snakes on a processor
Two offenses on one processor

Oh yes, they went there.

The medium lends itself to comic style figures that are easily identifiable even if drawn very simply. Some old childhood friends appear on these chips:

Mini Mickey
Milhouse Van Houten
There goes the floating point co-processor

But different techniques allow even photographic reproductions.

This is not what K-PAX predicted

So, what do you think is the ultimate culmination of expertise, geekiness, and k-rad awesome ass-kickery? Why, it might just be the guitar-playing Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Rock out with your cloaca out

Explore the gallery thoroughly, it's full of surprising, beautiful and funny stories and pictures. Find out why one chip contains maps of France as well as Texas, discover video game icons and model trains rolling on high speed shift register tracks - this site is an absolute gem.