Hasta La Ideas

Fresh from Singapore’s International Symposium on the Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits comes a fascinating selection of images which were entered into, yes, the conference’s annual photography competition…

The winning image was by Lim Saw Sing of Infineon Technologies in Malaysia, who won first prize for the above picture of what could well be a large group of people cavorting on a beach (and clearly on drugs). It’s actually a scanning electron microscope image of what happened when Sing “exposed a polyimide surface to etching by reactive ions”.

Tan Lee Koon of Systems-on-Silicon Manufacturing Co. took third prize with this image of the chipping at the edge of a silicon wafer, examined under a scanning electron microscope

According to the IEEE, the professional association for “the advancement of technology” which organises the symposium, Singapore has one of the largest concentrations of microelectronics technology expertise in Asia.

Flocking to its IPFA conference are a legion of “researchers, engineers, technicians and others who work in the area of Failure Analysis in Wafer FAB, Packages, Board Assembly and Service Labs.”

While we’re not entirely sure what that means (though ‘failure analysis’ is essentially the process of finding out why a particular electronic component fails to work), we do very much like the idea of their photography competition in which images are submitted taken by people working with extremely high powered microscopes.

The results were recently announced on the IEEE’s Spectrum website and linked to by boingboing.net.

According to point three of the rules of the photo competition, “The main judging criterion would be the aesthetic aspect of the image rather than its technical quality to be in line with the theme of the contest. Nevertheless, the image must be related to failure analysis.”

In no particular order, then, here are some of our other favourites from this year’s competition.

This is Lim Chan Way at Infineon Technologies’ picture of a membrane structure (top) sticking to a piece of carbon tape:

This image of what appears to be a set of wings is by Advanced Micro Devices analyst, Foo Fang Jie, who was looking at a fracture in a sample of silicon at the time. It won second prize.

And these scientists are not without a sense of humour in pursuit of lovely imagery. Here’s Jacqueline Kwa at Advanced Micro Devices’ transmission electron microscope picture of a rather elephantine silicon sample:

Finally, Khoo Bing Sheng took this image of a 20-micrometer-wide sculpture made from copper (using focused-ion-beam nano fabrication) at WinTech Nano-Technology.

The full list of winning work is at the IEEE’s Spectrum website, spectrum.ieee.org.

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The August Olympic Special issue of Creative Review contains a series of features that explore the past and present of the Games to mark the opening of London 2012: Adrian Shaughnessy reappraises Wolff Olins’ 2012 logo, Patrick Burgoyne talks to LOCOG’s Greg Nugent about how Wolff Olins’ original brand identity has been transformed into one consistent look for 2012, Eliza Williams investigates the role of sponsorship by global brands of the Games, Mark Sinclair asks Ian McLaren what it was like working with Otl Aicher as a member of his 1972 Munich Olympics design studio, Swiss designer Markus Osterwalder shows off some of his prize Olympic items from his vast archive, and much more. Plus, Rick Poynor’s assessment of this year’s Recontres d’Arles photography festival, and Michael Evamy on the genius of Yusaku Kamekura’s emblem for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

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