Learn More about Each Semiconductor Track
Semiconductor Industry Appeal
Thank you to our 2023 STARS sponsors! Intel, Cisco, Synopsys, L3Harris, SK hynix, SkyWater, Texas Instruments, Western Digital, TSMC, MediaTek, and GlobalFoundries. We aim to support 100 students for summer 2024. If your company would like to sponsor STARS, please contact Cristina Farmus. Additional details available in our sponsorship documentation (DOCX).
Semiconductor Design Track
The semiconductor design track gives students a rare undergraduate experience in designing, verifying, and submitting a digital integrated circuit for fabrication (tape-out). The longer-term goal is to equip students to be able to enter semiconductor design and verification internships in industry after their sophomore year. Students are not expected to already have much if any prior circuit design experience. The design track spans six weeks.
In week one, students will practice discrete circuit construction and use of bench instrumentation. In week two, students will design, simulate, and create FPGA prototypes of combinational logic functions such as multiplexers, adders, and decoders. In week three, students move on to sequential functions such as state machines, counters, and shift registers. All such functions are essential building blocks for more complex systems. In week four, students will be guided in using rigorous block diagrams to plan more designs based on many instances of functions implemented previously. Small teams will be formed and led by undergraduate teaching assistants who will guide team members in planning their final design. In week five, the teams will implement the blocks for their design. Finally, in week six, students will integrate their designs, and run the designs through a place and route and physical verification process. Later, teaching assistants will integrate all designs into a single pad frame and complete the tape-out. A few months later, the resulting chips will be returned to students mounted on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and guidance will be provided for testing of the designs. Staff for the design track include one graduate teaching assistant, eight undergraduate teaching assistants, two lecturers, and two laboratory coordinators led by Dr. Mark C Johnson.
Semiconductor Manufacturing Track
Semiconductor manufacturing track will focus on skill development on chip fabrication, semiconductor materials and device characterization. Students will be learning about cleanroom safety, substrate engineering, oxidation, lithography, thin film deposition (physical vapor deposition and atomic layer deposition), reactive ion etching and wet chemicals-based cleaning and etching, thermal diffusion and annealing, ion implantation, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) and basic integration of MOSCAP and CMOS devices. They will be trained through online and in-person instruction, interactive discussions, virtual and in-person hands on training in vFabLab and cleanroom, respectively and video tutorials. For material characterization they will be learning about atomic force microscopy, x-ray diffraction analysis, secondary ion mass spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. For device characterization they will be learning about MOSCAP and MOSFET performance and reliability measurement and analysis.
Advanced System Integration and Packaging (ASIP)
As traditional semiconductor technologies that rely on transistor area scaling reach their physical limits, reducing cost and energy consumption of future systems while achieving performance and meeting area constraints requires advanced electronics packaging. Reducing fabrication cost critically depends on reducing the size of chips since smaller chips result in greater manufacturing process yield. Lower cost can also be achieved with pre-made reusable chips, and to reduce energy consumption new system integration strategies with shorter interconnections between chips are needed. Integrating multiple chips of either different materials or made with different process, i.e., Heterogeneous Integration, enables complex functionality. Therefore, future computing systems with AI chips, systems for 5G/6G communication, as well as defense systems will all be enabled by multiple smaller “chiplets” that are stacked closely together (3D Heterogeneous Integration) and assembled closed to each other on a high-density interposer (i.e., on a package – referred as 2.5D integration). In this track you will learn the challenges of chiplet design – that is to break the function across multiple “chiplets” as well as hardware challenges associated with chiplet integration into 2.5D/3D packages.
Thank you to our 2024 STARS Sponsors!
The 2023 STARS Program was made possible by:
Photo Gallery - STARS 2023
