Purdue gives students leg up in chip-making through summer program

On a recent 90-degree day in the heart of Purdue University’s campus, dozens of students sat in a windowless basement lab, wiring keypads into integrated circuits, drawing diagrams on whiteboards and staring at hundreds of lines of code for tweaks amounting to a keystroke.

Across campus, their classmates were suiting up in personal protective equipment to head into a clean room where they would spend upward of four hours a day making microscopic adjustments to microchips in a pristine environment.

The students were among 100 who recently completed an intensive, eight-week training program devoted to the understanding of semiconductors, the crystalline solids that conduct electricity and power computer microchips.

Program participants take part in one of three training tracks—chip design, manufacturing or advanced system integration and packaging—and learn through hands-on industry simulations and curriculum.

“It’s like being an engineer instead of an engineering student,” Mitchell Carey said of his experience in STARS, which stands for Summer Training, Awareness, and Readiness for Semiconductors.

As the federal government spends billions to bring microelectronics production back to the United States, several programs have been created across the country to develop a workforce equipped to power the industry.

A July 2023 industry estimate cited by the White House says the country will need 25,000 new highly educated engineers for the industry by 2030, in addition to a similar number of technicians without four-year degrees.

STARS program director and professor John Howarter said the goal for his program (and many others across the country) is to grow in scale to address the anticipated workforce needs.

“I’m always thinking about, how does this grow beyond 100 students a year?” he said. “A big part of STARS has always been about providing access to students and accelerating them towards the semiconductor workforce.”

Because Purdue is a leading microelectronics university, the program is seeing soaring demand. In its second year, STARS drew 768 applications from students at Purdue and elsewhere.

STARS students are mostly incoming sophomores and juniors. Most go to Purdue, but several are from the local Ivy Tech Community College campus and other universities. Many participants had heard of microelectronics through their coursework or computer-hardware hobbies but did not have an intimate understanding of the sector.

Industry sponsors—including SK hynix, Synopsys, SkyWater Technology and Intel—not only financially support the program but also send company representatives during the course to network with students and share knowledge.

Students receive a $10,000 stipend, which must be applied to tuition, but they said the bigger draw is working with the big-name company representatives and learning real-world applications. STARS also positions students to take on more advanced internships in the industry after they complete the program.

In the manufacturing track, students work in a clean room, a controlled environment that’s designed to keep out pollutants like dust, airborne microbes and aerosol particles for delicate work such as computer chip manufacturing. Engineering professor Arnold Chung-Ye Chen said that access is a rare opportunity for undergraduates.

STARS student Sriniketh Atmakur said participants “really learn about what works and what doesn’t.”

“That experience is very necessary, and it’ll help us in not only this field but that troubleshooting will help us in any other area of study that we want to pursue.” Students are on track to fill jobs as process and design engineers, where starting salaries tend to be north of $70,000 a year. Howarter said he expects most students to eventually work in the industry and to end up in the Midwest.

The next step for STARS, he said, is to increase Purdue’s faculty and facility bandwidth so it can offer a similar program year-round, including course flexibility for students whose lives might not fit an eight-week, intensive summer program.

Inside the lab

STARS students are treated like interns at a business and essentially work a 9-to-5 schedule.

Those in the design track work most often in a computer lab, while manufacturing students and advanced system integration and packaging students spend significant time in a clean room. This year, about 75 students participated in the design track; the rest were in either manufacturing or integration and packaging.

In the design program, students spend the first few weeks interacting with companies and learning the basics of circuitry and chip design. They are then divided into 12 teams and assigned a project to build over the remaining weeks mostly on their own but with the help of their teaching assistants and professor Mark Johnson.

This summer, projects fell into two categories: building central processing units (CPUs, essentially the brain of a computer) from scratch, or designing games, such as Snake, Google’s dino run and Hangman.

Students building CPUs added functions like calculators and a function similar to a computer mouse, while others configured messaging systems that could send signals to other circuits. After the program, their projects will be memorialized into computer chips.

Manufacturing students spent their first two weeks primarily in lectures for baseline instruction. The final six weeks, they tackled projects specializing in various chip-making processes. One team’s project, for example, was attempting to determine the smallest feature they could fit on ever-smaller microchips, starting with an eight-micron chip down to a one-micron chip. (A micron is 0.001 millimeter.)

Leaving an imprint

In the last week of this year’s program, multiple students told IBJ they are considering continuing their education in semiconductors and going into the industry—a choice they had not fully contemplated before this summer.

“I just didn’t know enough about it to be confident that it would be something I can do,” said Sam Gutterman. “And now that I know it’s in my wheelhouse … I personally feel so much more motivated to pursue extra things that I wouldn’t have even considered before.”

That’s why the program is designed to introduce students to the semiconductor industry and its stakeholders, Howarter said.

“There’s a lot about manufacturing in particular, but especially the semiconductor industry, that I think is kind of hidden from you,” he said. “One of the things I like to do is kind of broaden that view to get people excited.”

Students coming out of the design program said their experience deepened their understanding of the industry, cleared up some misconceptions and clarified what they want to focus on for the remainder of college.

Caroline Chang, an Ivy Tech student, said her experience convinced her to pursue manufacturing instead of design.

Gutterman plans to switch out some courses to better prepare for the career he now sees himself in and wants to get involved with research as soon as possible.

“When I applied to Purdue, I knew I was going to be a computer engineer, but I didn’t know what it would take or the opportunities I would have,” he said. “It’s so crazy to be in a position where there are sponsors that want to pay money to teach us and get us prepared for the industry. I’m really thankful to get in.”•