By Nick Shchetko
WELLINGTON, Nev.--From his basement in a sparsely populated part
of northwestern Nevada, Patrick Mulreany operates a museum that
attracts about four visitors a year. Its focus: semiconductors and
the shiny disks used to make them.
The former Hewlett-Packard Co. engineer's private collection of
about 120 displays highlights advancements in the electronics
industry. It also points to the peculiarities of a small number of
people whose passion is silicon platters.
"There's a lot of stuff around here that's one of a kind," said
Mr. Mulreany, smiling as he led a visitor down a long hall with
dozens of framed displays of chips and wafers on the walls.
Stamp or coin collectors can usually point to the artistic
characteristics of their holdings. Not people who seek out
semiconductor wafers, which are processed in factories and diced up
to yield individual chips.
Though wafers are largely indistinguishable from one another to
the untrained eye, collectors see aesthetic merit.
"If you hold them in the sunshine, they just spit rainbows right
back at your face. They're beautiful," says Joyce Haughey, a
graphics designer from Trafalgar, Ind., who keeps several thousand
scrap wafers in her studio.
Some enthusiasts, like Timothy Sears of Huntsville, Ala., use
microscopes to view the industrial artistry inside chips. "Like
futuristic cities with roads and buildings, hundreds of millions of
components are connected in vast landscapes only visible at
ultrahigh magnifications," he says.
But motivations vary widely among wafer lovers, a tiny tribe who
have never been reliably counted and don't typically engage in
organized activities.
Ms. Haughey, for example, turns electronic components into works
of art. Others assemble displays based on technical or historical
significance. Still others seek profit by finding unusual wafers or
chips and reselling them.
Wafers, created by slicing up silicon ingots, are processed
using costly machines that trace complex circuit patterns and
selectively add and remove silicon and other materials. To yield
more chips per batch, manufacturers have increased wafer diameters
over the years from an inch or two to 12 inches in some cases.
Collecting them can take effort, since wafers are an interim
manufacturing step rather than a product companies sell. Those
deemed not suitable for commercial purposes--if not recycled by
manufacturers--may wind up as gifts to employees or partners, in
scrap heaps or funneled to flea markets or websites like eBay.
Collectors typically seek out processed wafers, which give off
an iridescence when light strikes them at certain angles.
Visual effects draw people like Antoine Bercovici, a
postdoctoral researcher from Paris who collaborates with a friend
to take colorful microphotographs of the inside of chips.
A microscope can sometimes uncover surprises, Mr. Bercovici
notes. One H-P chip from the 1990s, code-named "Hummingbird,"
includes a picture of that bird that is revealed under heavy
magnification. It's a kind of inside joke, a decoration few will
ever see. Another, dubbed "Velociraptor," sports a tiny image of
the dinosaur. Many such images end up in "Silicon Zoo," an online
gallery run by Michael W. Davidson, a Florida State University
researcher and photographer.
Wafers don't always give up their secrets easily. Many are
unmarked by manufacturers or have logos or numbers that aren't easy
to interpret.
Steve Tinter, a collector in Sydney, Australia, says he
sometimes spends hours studying wafers under a microscope to
identify chips and their manufacturers. His holdings of more than
1,000 wafers include rarities like creations of former
supercomputer maker nCube Corp. and many unidentified wafers from
Xerox Corp. "I have no idea what they are even after trying to find
out for more than a year," he says.
Steve Emery, a collector from Winter Park, Fla., who owns about
20,000 wafers in complete or partial form, says he spent many hours
over a five-year period figuring out the provenance of one
wafer.
Most wafers aren't worth much, but some finds can pay off. Those
with aesthetic appeal are often listed on eBay for $10 to $20 each.
Historically significant chips can fetch thousands of dollars. Mr.
Tinter, who says he sells wafers sometimes to "feed the addiction"
to buying and selling recently placed a $1,000 price on eBay for a
wafer featuring Motorola 68000 chips--a variety used in computers
like Apple Inc.'s Lisa, from the early 1980s.
Mr. Emery says he can quickly flick through such online listings
and identify chips and when wafers were fabricated and judge
whether a purchase of $15 to $20 might be worth hundreds. "There's
definitely a high when you hit it," he says.
He estimates that one tiny wafer sporting chips from industry
pioneer Fairchild Semiconductor, which probably cost him $20, is
now worth $5,000 to $10,000. On the other hand, Mr. Emery says he
bought about 4,000 wafers for roughly $600, an average cost of
around 15 cents each.
Collectors do more than search through eBay. One person who buys
and sells wafers speaks of meeting factory workers years ago in
cars at remote quiet locations, receiving disks wrapped in work
gloves. "Some of the guys that did supply to me got in trouble
[with their employers] and were probably fired" for taking company
property, says Bob Lewis, a Sunnyvale, Calif., resident who has
been gathering and selling silicon wafers for more than three
decades.
Ms. Haughey once drove 85 miles to gather a 900-pound box of
scrap wafers, and then spent about a month sifting through it. "It
was cold, it was Christmas," she recalls. The wafers were "out in
the shed, and to get to the bottom of the box I was like almost
standing on my head leaning in."
While they don't gather formally, some collectors stay in touch
to trade wafers and share experiences. Others have more specific
reasons for connecting.
Mr. Emery, for example, assembles what he calls
"chipscapes"--displays showcasing various historical
semiconductors. He has sold hundreds of them to buyers around the
globe, including museums. One client is Mr. Mulreany, who bought
about 90 displays for his private collection before starting to
design his own, sometimes supplemented by Mr. Emery's artwork.
The collection is one of Mr. Mulreany's many hobbies. He is also
a ham radio operator and electronics tinkerer. He spent 34 years
working on a 1,920-page tome on standard verbs in the Irish
language. He is open to the idea of letting the public see his
semiconductor collection someday, but he seems satisfied to operate
a silicon museum that attracts a very small audience.
"I spend a lot of time by myself," he says. "I don't really need
friends, I guess."
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