This Analog Devices ADSP-2181 Chip Looks Normal, But It’s Hiding a Microscopic Sonic the Hedgehog

Photo credit: Evil Monkeyz Designs
At first glance, this appears to be a normal ADSP-2181 chip, but after some careful disassembly and under a microscope, Sonic the Hedgehog appears, or at least his face. This chip comes from a family of microcomputers from Analog Devices, and is optimized for digital signal processing (DSP), so you won’t find it in most computers. Read more for a video, additional pictures and information.

This DSP chip can be used in a wide variety of applications, including audio / image processing, speech recognition, mobile phones, or basically any type of application where digital data is required to be processed in the most efficient manner available. For those interested in this type of silicon graffiti, make sure to check out the Silicon Zoo.

The ADSP-21xx family is based on the ADSP-2100 architecture. The ADSP-2100 processor contains three full-function and independent computational units: an arithmetic/logic unit, a multiplier/accumulator and a barrel shifter. The computational units process 16-bit data directly and provide for multi-precision computation,” said Evil Monkeyz Designs.