Personalized Silicone Bear Student Competition Badge

[Daniel Valuch] shared with us a fun and record-breaking conference badge story (Slovak, translated). He was one of the organizers of the “ZENIT in electronics” event, which is an annual Slovak national competition for students. During the competition, students are assigned a letter + number code in an effort to keep results submission anonymous, and the organizers are always looking for a fun way to assign these codes - this time, they made it with custom silicone!

It turns out that [Peter], one of [Daniel]'s colleagues, was working at the time for onsemi who was doing a tapeout and had free space on his test chips. Of course, they didn't have to think twice. When it was a student's turn to draw their ID number, instead of a piece of paper, they would receive a SOIC-16 packet with custom silicon glued on it. Then they had to solder it to their competition badge - which was, of course, a PCB. Each chip was individually laser cut to contain the student's number, and that number could then be decoded using a multimeter - or a reasonably sharp eye.

There's a lot more to this competition story than just the badge, but the custom silicone part certainly caught our eye. Who knows, maybe next year the stars will align again and we'll see custom silicon on one of the hacker conference badges. After all, things have progressed rapidly on this front - for example, since the launch of the Skywater PDK project in 2020, there have already been several successful executions, and if you want to know more, you can check out the HackChat we have had this year, and this Remoticon 2020 workshop!