Ken Shirriff Provides Weaver Marilou Schultz with a New Inspiration: The Humble 555 Timer Chip

Navajo weaver Marilou Schultz has completed a design that may look strangely familiar to some — being as it is, reverse engineer Ken Shirriff explains, based on the inner workings of the classic 555 timer chip.

"The 555 chip is constructed from a tiny flake of silicon with a layer of metallic wiring on top," Shirriff writes of the hardware which inspired Schultz' creation. "In the rug, this wiring is visible as the thick white lines, while the silicon forms the black background. One conspicuous feature of the rug is the reddish-orange diamonds around the perimeter. These correspond to the connections between the silicon chip and its eight pins. Tiny golden bond wires — thinner than a human hair — are attached to the square bond pads to provide these connections."

Schultz' fabric creation is recognizable as a 555 timer to anyone who has seen under the plastic package to the silicon die underneath, thanks in no small part to the three transistors at its corners. Shirriff, however, didn't need to puzzle that out at all: he suggested the project to traditional weaver Schultz himself, offering a dark-field microscope die image taken by Antoine Bercovici as the basis for the pattern.

"For the 555 timer weaving, Schultz experimented with different materials," Shirriff writes. "Silver and gold metallic threads represent the aluminum and copper in the chip. The artist explains that 'it took a lot more time to incorporate the metallic threads,' but it was worth the effort because 'it is spectacular to see the rug with the metallics in the dark with a little light hitting it.' Aniline dyes provided the black and lavender colors. Although natural logwood dye produces a beautiful purple, it fades over time, so Schultz used an aniline dye instead. The lavender colors are dedicated to the weaver's mother, who passed away in February; purple was her favorite color."

Perhaps surprisingly, this isn't the first time Schultz has taken inspiration from a piece of common technology: back in 1994 the weaver produced a similar, though more complex, design that replicated the die of an Intel Pentium processor — a project commissioned by Intel itself as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society. "The rug is accurate enough that each region can be marked with its corresponding function in the real chip," Shirriff said of that design in his analysis back in September last year. "The weaving is [even] accurate enough to determine that it represents a specific Pentium variant, called P54C."

Shirriff's full write-up is available on his website.

Main article image courtesy of First American Art Magazine.