Silicon Wafer with Communication Chips - 6 inch, Ethernet

About this Artwork: This artwork is based on a silicon wafer that contains chips that helped build the Internet. This wafer is 6" in diameter and has over 232 computer chips on it. This wafer has an interesting star pattern in the center. The pattern comes from the chip having four identical, independent “cores,” with each core rotated 90 degrees from the adjacent cores. The wafer was made by Dallas Semiconductor, Inc. in 1995. The chip’s designation is DS21QA43. The artwork behind the wafer is an image of several chips from the silicon wafer. These chips were used for high-speed Wide Area Network (WAN) communications. Each of the cores could handle one complete DS1/E1 2Mbps framed stream over two telephone twisted pairs. Total bandwidth for the chip was 8Mbps. In the beginning days of the WWW Internet, 2Mbps was a blistering speed. About Making Computer Chips: Computer chips start out as ordinary sand, which is silicon dioxide. However, the silicon must be made very, very pure. The