SEMICONDUCTOR DESIGN TALENT
Fueling New York’s Next Generation of Chip Innovators
Success stories from NYDesign’s partners and participants show what integrated circuit design education looks like in real classrooms and labs across New York. These projects highlight how students, educators, and institutions are using NYDesign’s tools, training, and support to move from theory to working silicon.
Empowering High School Innovators in IC Design
Redemption Christian Academy (RCA), a historically Black boarding school in Troy, New York, partnered with NYDesign in 2023 to bring advanced integrated circuit (IC) design directly into a K–12 learning environment. Through a NYDesign-administered curriculum, RCA students designed and submitted more than ten integrated circuits in just six months, combining individual projects with two whole-class designs that showcased collaboration as well as technical growth. The program positioned RCA alongside leading higher education partners as a proving ground for how early exposure to chip design can open doors for students who may never have imagined themselves in the semiconductor industry.
For many RCA students, Chip Ignite and the NYDesign-supported coursework were their first real encounter with digital circuits, logic, and hardware description languages. One student, 15-year-old Charlize Hill from Brooklyn, described entering the class with almost no prior experience in computer science or engineering, then progressing through topics like binary numbers, digital logic gates, and LED-based traffic light simulations before tackling a group capstone project that connected multiple custom circuits together. The experience was demanding but highly motivating, leading every student in the course to complete their own design and choose to continue with additional curriculum, while inspiring new students to join future sessions. As Charlize explained, the knowledge gained in Chip Ignite felt challenging yet valuable, laying a foundation she believes will benefit her in the future.
RPI Graduate Team Turns Custom Silicon Wristwatch from Idea to IC
Graduate students in electrical and computer engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) used NYDesign‑enabled training and tools to design “RPIce,” a custom silicon wristwatch that encodes time in concentric rings of LEDs rather than traditional hands or digits. The watchface uses three rings of twelve LEDs to represent hours, minutes, and seconds, with eight additional center LEDs that track progress toward the next five‑minute and five‑second marks. Through this work, the team moved beyond classroom theory into a full chip implementation, designing the logic, timing, and display circuitry that would ultimately be fabricated on silicon.
Over the course of winter and spring 2023, the students designed and verified the circuit using shift registers to store time values and translate them into a format suitable for driving an LED matrix, reducing the required outputs while maintaining precise visual feedback. The project gave them rare exposure to an end‑to‑end integrated circuit workflow: defining functionality, architecting the design, implementing and debugging the logic, and preparing for manufacturing. The experience proved formative for the team, deepening their understanding of IC design and fabrication, and one member, Nico Altomare, was later recognized by Analog Devices as an outstanding student designer for his circuit design work.
Watch Face Concept, Hours (Red), Minutes (Green), Blue (Seconds)
Block Diagram of Watch Circuit
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