HBCUs Taking Bite of Apple’s Chip Fab Engineer Effort Leave a comment

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Participating in Apple’s New Silicon Initiative (NSI) to grow the number of chip-fabrication engineers has opened a world of pathways that university student Hridweek Karki never thought of turning onto.

“I think the NSI program has made a big impact on what I want to do with my career,” he told EE Times.

Karki is planning to pursue a doctoral degree after graduation from Howard University, while before the NSI a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering was his goal. He is newly excited about the possibility of a career focusing on research, and he feels optimistic about a growing need for chip-fabrication engineers.

“The United States has had leadership in the design of chips for a long time,” said Michael Spencer, interim chair of electrical and computer engineering at Morgan State University. “And they have allowed our fabrication to migrate out of the country. We’re trying to get some of that back.”

Relying on information from Apple, he said one fabrication engineer is needed for every four design engineers.

Apple’s NSI is meant to expose and excite students like Karki, as well as teachers like Spencer, about computer-hardware design in general and VLSI in particular. It’s a program that can help the United States succeed in its goal in reinvigorating its semiconductor industry.

The initiative originated about five years ago when the industry noted “a couple of very concerning trends,” Jared Zerbe, Apple’s director of engineering for hardware technology, told EE Times. 

“One of them was a falling interest in hardware design, as app development, AI and ML took over the popular interest,” he said. “At the same time, here at Apple all the products that we’re building have an ever-increasing number of silicon designs in them and an ever-increasing need for talented silicon engineers. We knew that if we were experiencing that the rest of the industry was experiencing it as well. And you can’t have these two trends, one going down and one going up, persist without something bad happening.”

The initiative hopes to reverse a trend that has been decades in the making.

Pamela Obiomon, dean of the college of engineering at Prairie View A&M University, one of the schools active in the NSI, said when she was in school pursuing a doctoral degree at Prairie View, “there were lots of IC design courses. And we also at Prairie View had a clean room, but it was very expensive to maintain and went away. That was 20 years ago.”

Many parts to Apple’s program

The initiative includes an annual kickoff event at the start of the school year, in-person guest lectures, a special pipeline to internships, scholarships and fellowships. Apple’s engineers provide design review as students participate in their schools’ new classes for chip design and testing.

“What we found is, it’s kind of a magical thing, that when you get VLSI (very large-scale integration) engineers from Apple together with students, pretty much every single time you do that, good things happen,” Zerbe said.

The alchemy he describes could happen during the times he and his other engineers leave their Cupertino, Calif., Austin, Texas, and other locations to travel to any of the dozen or so schools in the NSI. They include Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and UCLA Berkeley, the inaugural group to become involved in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, Apple added four historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including Alabama A&M, Howard, Morgan State and Prairie View A&M.

“What I particularly like is that they’re not just giving us the money and then going away, they are actually involved in the program with mentorships and lectures and so forth,” Spencer said of the NSI. “They are quite serious—and trying to see outcomes.”

So far, about 16 students have taken Morgan State’s IC-design class, known colloquially as tapeout, he said, with many more enrolled in the prerequisite courses that lead up to it. The lower-level classes also help prepare students for a followup class to test and validate a fabricated chip, a process known as bring up. 

In addition, one Morgan State student interned with Apple in the summer of 2023. Internships are not part of the NSI, but participating students have special access to them.

Howard University is also seeing enrollment increases. Nearly 30 students have enrolled in the NSI-related curriculum, and it’s luring students from other majors.

“I serve as academic advisor for computer engineering, and I see that in the past year, about two or three students from mathematics or physics have moved into computer engineering,” said Hassan Salmani, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Howard. “This is going to help them really see the potential of being a computer engineer.”

A new 900-square-foot, $250,000 lab in Howard’s engineering building may also be a draw, with 26 new computers that are cloud-connected, advanced multimedia to enable remote lectures and chip-testing equipment. The department is considering adding additional lab activities in the university’s existing clean room.

Likewise, NSI students at Prairie View have access to a new 700-square-foot clean room in the university’s new engineering building, a project that was separate from the Apple initiative, Obiomon said.

HBCUs, initial NSI schools share curricula

Students are not the only beneficiaries. The three initial NSI schools are sharing their curriculum and course syllabi, including lectures, notes and class activity assessments, with the HBCUs.

“When we added the HBCU schools, we saw there was another need, which was that HBCU professors were so overloaded with teaching so many classes that when they needed to update one of their courses, they just didn’t have the bandwidth,” Zerbe said. Obiomon agreed with Zerbe’s assessment.

Now, when HBCU professors want to make an update to a class they can look at the course material, lectures, and problem sets from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and UCLA Berkeley and pull whatever they need to enrich their own material.