Inspiring Future Innovators: NORDTECH Internships in Action
It’s internship season and exciting summer student opportunities are taking place across the NORDTECH hub.
While internships not only provide practical experience in a specific occupation or profession, they also offer an opportunity to network with industry professionals, develop new talents and passions, and the opportunity to test the waters of a given career path, before fully “jumping in.”
NORDTECH provides partial and full funding for internship programs at NY CREATES, Cornell University’s NanoScale Facility (CNF), University of Albany’s College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering’s (CNSE), Griffiss Institute’s Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and the NORDTECH Summer Internship Program (SIP). This summer NORDTECH is supporting 22 student interns in total, a 30% increase compared to summer 2024, which launched the start of our summer internship programs.
NY CREATES, owner and operator of the nation’s largest and most advanced non-profit semiconductor R&D facility, has developed the L.E.A.R.N. Program (Learning by Experience through Advanced Research in Nanotechnology). This program is partially supported by NSF (National Science Foundation), AIM Photonics, and the Microelectronics Commons NORDTECH Hub. The NORDTECH hub is proud to sponsor two Cleanroom Operator summer students within the L.E.A.R.N. Program focused on photonics modeling and characterization.
Designed to provide students with hands-on training and practical experience in advanced silicon wafer fabrication, which prepares them for careers in the semiconductor industry, L.E.AR.N. will be hosting 32 graduate and undergraduate interns this summer. Participants are drawn from degree programs ranging from associate’s level (AAS, AOS, AS), to baccalaureate, (BS, BE), M.S. and Ph.D. and from a variety of fields including Engineering, Engineering Technology, Microelectronics, Optical Engineering, Physics, and Photonics. These interns interact with NY CREATES and AIM engineering teams to work on various projects in the semiconductor industry.
Nine undergraduate students from this summer’s group have been offered the Cleanroom Operator Level 1 position. They will operate equipment in various semiconductor process areas, such as photolithography, CVD, PVD, CMP, metrology and more. The students spend their days within a leading-edge 300mm silicon wafer cleanroom similar to an Intel, Micron or GlobalFoundries fabrication facility.
L.E.A.R.N. interns also participate in training/mentoring throughout their time at NY CREATES. Mentors assist and prepare the students to enter the semiconductor workforce by providing them with key insights about industry careers, best practices for working within a team-based R&D environment, and valuable advice on how to approach career opportunities. Coupled with the essential skills and knowledge that interns receive during their daily work, L.E.A.R.N. students are uniquely prepared to succeed in the semiconductor industry. Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF) this summer is supporting 3 Technical Interns and 1 Workforce Development Intern. Internships last 10 and eight weeks for the technical and workforce development programs, respectively.
The Technical Interns work closely with a CNF staff mentor to develop and document baseline processes for the newly installed NORDTECH tools. All the selected interns expressed a strong interest in nanotechnology, an enthusiasm for working in the cleanroom, and a clear desire to engage in hands-on work. They have a curiosity for problem-solving and a strong motivation to deepen their understanding of advanced technologies.
During their first week of orientation, Technical Interns participate in the CNF course “Technology & Characterization at the Nanoscale,” which provides a foundational understanding of nanoscience research methods and tools, with an emphasis on nanofabrication and characterization techniques. After completing the course, the interns take part in the CNF new user orientation and safety training, followed by hands-on tool training necessary to begin their projects.
All three Technical Interns are rising sophomores from RIT and Cornell University studying Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and related technologies. Their summer projects include:
Establishing baseline processes for superconducting materials in the Angstrom Quantum system while learning associated metrology techniques to characterize these materials
Characterizing the direct-write lithography on the Heidelberg MLA 150 while learning how to run tests for the dose, defocus and beam offset, with the aim to characterize multiple resists as well as the alignment system
Establishing baseline processes for superconducting materials in the AJA Quantum system while learning associated metrology techniques to characterize these materials
CNF is also supporting an additional intern to assist with workforce development activities. This intern is the TST BOCES New Vision engineering instructor. This internship is designed to assist with the curriculum development for the new AJA educational vacuum system. In addition, the intern will take an active role in outreach events such as NanoDay and the Micron Chip Camps.
This summer, four undergraduate students have the extraordinary opportunity to participate in the University of Albany’sCollege of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering’s (CNSE) Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP).
This decade-old program is designed to blend academic learning with career exploration in a research setting with faculty from multiple CNSE departments, including Electrical & Computer Engineering, Nanoscale Science & Engineering, Computer Science, and Environmental and Sustainable Engineering. Participants have access to CNSE’s Innovation Lab, a 200mm wafer scale cleanroom located at the NY CREATES Albany NanoTech Complex. The Innovation Lab is currently benefitting from $7.4 million in new equipment being installed on behalf of the Hub.
Faculty who mentor SURP students provide critical, hands-on training for students across multiple disciplines, with an emphasis on STEM. Many projects leverage the semiconductor and microelectronics fabrication, measurement, and design resources at CNSE and within the NORDTECH.
The four NORDTECH-supported interns are among 50+ students in the 2025 SURP cohort studying chemistry, electrical and computer engineering, environmental and sustainable engineering, nanoscale science and engineering and computer science. Funding from NORDTECH covered the interns’ stipend and programming costs.
At the Griffiss Institute NORDTECH is funding two interns to work directly with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate whose mission encompasses research in command and control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and cyber security. The first intern is working in the Computing and Communications Division with a project focused on quantization, reducing computational overhead and the memory footprint of AI/ML models for EDGE computing applications. The goal is to determine how model quantization affects the inference performance (power, throughput, latency, accuracy, etc.) for various popular architectures.
The second intern is working in the Information Warfare Division on a project where two key enabling technologies will be leveraging a programmable secure hardware interface (i.e., reconfigurable logic - an FPGA) to support user-defined security policies with hardware-root-of-trust capabilities to enforce security and trust policies, and a group anonymous authentication protocol to control the access to services and resources granted to individual components in a context-aware manner. The work is comprised of:
Prototyping an ethernet-based attachment using a FPGA to demonstrate its feasibility and exploring how to formalize FPGA implementations at different levels of abstraction including logic minimization methods and functional correctness
Evaluating the feasibility of implementing additional security features (i.e., correct TLS usage, Shamir’s secret sharing, traffic filtering)
NORDTECH is proud to be supporting its inaugural cohort for the NORDTECH Summer Internship Program (SIP). The SIP is based on industry mentorship and provides opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students as well as U.S. and international students to spend 10 weeks learning from some of our top NORDTECH industry and academic partners. This experience is paid at a competitive wage and offers the option of security clearance if needed for U.S. citizens. Our industry partners include NoMIS Power, SRI International, Astrabeam LLC, AsterTech LLC and our one academic partner is the Advanced Science Research Center, CUNY. While most mentors were located regionally to New York, the SRI and SIP internships are located in Palo Alto, CA.
The 10 SIP interns range from first year through master’s students and hale from universities such as Carnegie Mellon, University at Albany, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Binghamton University, UC Davis, City College of New York, and University of Cincinnati among others. These students’ fields of study focus on computer science and electrical engineering. Their summer research topics include such innovations as the development of a digital twin for semiconductor manufacturing processes and development of advanced metasurfaces for augmented reality (AR) applications. In these highly relevant areas, these students are receiving top notch mentoring and experience to find success in the world of microelectronics.
If you are interested in learning more about these internships or NORDTECH, visit our web page at www.nordtechub.org.
Authors: Darrilyn Di Nardo (RPI), Nate Cady (U. Albany), Ron Olson (Cornell), Andrada Niculae (NY CREATES), Wendy Carpenter (Griffiss Institute), and Todd Humiston (Griffiss Institute)