[Daniel valuch] shared with us an interesting and record breaking story of conference badges (Slovak, Translated). He is one of the organizers of the “Zenit in Electronics” activity, which is the annual national student competition in Slovakia. During the competition, in order to submit results anonymously, students were assigned letter + number codes. The organizers have been looking for an interesting way to assign these codes – this time, they used custom silicon!
It happened that [Peter], a colleague of [Daniel], was working for ONSEMI at that time. He was making a recording, and there was some free space on their test chip. Of course, they don’t have to think twice. When it was a student’s turn to draw their ID card number, they received an soic-16 package with custom silicon glued on it. Then, they must solder it to the competition Badge – of course, this is a PCB. Each chip is individually laser cut to contain the student’s number, which can then be decoded using a multimeter or a fairly sharp eye.
The story of this competition is much more than the badge, but the customized silicon element in it really attracted our attention. Who knows, maybe next year the stars will be arranged again, and we will see customized silicon on the badge of the hack conference. After all, the work in this area is progressing very fast – for example, since the launch of the skywater PDK project in 2020, there have been several successful operations. If you want to learn more, you can check out our hackchat this year and this remoticon 2020 seminar!