Students from NDSU assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Kushal Ponugoti’s Digital Design and Computer Engineering courses toured the clean room suite in R2.
Microelectronics, or the design and fabrication of very small electronic components, constitute essential engineering design for features of modern life, like cell phones or smart watches. Through facilities and instrumentation in the North Dakota State University clean room suite, NDSU offers a unique asset that advances industry needs, especially in workforce development in our region.
A recent tour of the NDSU clean room suite provided NDSU engineering students with an up-close view of the type of research conducted in that facility.
Students from NDSU assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Kushal Ponugoti’s Digital Design and Computer Engineering courses toured the clean room suite in R2.
“The clean room tour gives our undergraduate students a rare and valuable opportunity to connect what they learn in Digital Design and other relevant computer engineering with real-world semiconductor fabrication processes,” Ponugoti said. “Seeing the precision and environment required to build integrated circuits helps them appreciate the scale and complexity of their design in class. It also introduces them to potential career paths in hardware, VLSI and nanofabrication - areas they might not have otherwise considered. I believe experiences like this make engineering education more tangible, inspiring and relevant. Beyond the tour, students are encouraged to use these facilities for senior design or side projects, which opens up hands-on research and prototyping opportunities early in their careers.”
NDSU's State-of-the-Art Clean Room Facilities
The NDSU clean room suite is specifically designed for research and testing in electronics manufacturing. It is 12,000 square feet and is broken into two rooms. Clean rooms are essential in this field as they prevent contamination, maintain product quality and provide a controlled environment that ensures consistent and reliable electronics production. Even the smallest dust particles or other contaminants can interfere with the delicate electronic component manufacturing processes.
Clean rooms are engineered to minimize airborne particles, maintaining a pristine environment for optimal production. The clean room suite in the Research 2 building on the NDSU campus is managed by Materials, Characterization, Analysis and Fabrication (MCAF) engineering technicians Greg Strommen and Fred Haring for their research work. But the clean room suite also provides hands-on learning opportunities for students.
“The clean rooms at NDSU provide a unique opportunity for students to gain valuable experience and knowledge about the microelectronics fabrication process and equipment from MCAF staff members Greg Strommen and Fred Haring,” NDSU core research facilities executive director Scott Payne said. “Engineering students with these skills and experiences are highly valued and sought after by local and regional microelectronic manufacturing companies.”
NDSU Vice President for Research and Creative Activity Colleen Fitzgerald stated that having clean room facilities on the NDSU campus is of great use and importance for researchers.
“The clean rooms provide researchers with an area that is a controlled environment, free from contamination, which is vital for certain types of research activities,” Fitzgerald said. “This environment allows for reliable, consistent electronic component production on the NDSU campus, which is also important for numerous industry partners in the region who rely on manufacturing and using those components.”
Student Experience and Learning Opportunities
To enter the clean room suite, individuals must wear apparel that minimizes the shedding of particles. This included gowns, facial and hair coverings and footwear coverings. On their tour, students saw how computer chips are produced.
"As an electrical engineering student, sometimes, as you deal with the theoretical aspects of topics, you lose sight of the practical side,” said Carson Klersy, one of Ponugoti’s students. “During my tour of the clean room, I was able to finally put the pieces together of how computer chips are made. When you see the machines involved, terms like “spin coating” make more sense as you can physically see that the machine spins the chip around to coat it evenly. We learned how to etch the pattern onto the chip and followed the process to turn the etched silicon into a stereotypical black plastic box with metal leads. I highly recommend taking the opportunity to tour this facility. “
“Seeing the fabrication process in person emphasized how important it is to design with manufacturing limitations in mind,” said NDSU student and fellow tour participant Gabriella Stech. “As an engineer said during the tour, you can design any chip you want, but it won’t be great unless it's manufacturable. That idea stuck with me and tied together everything I’ve learned from previous tours in semiconductor manufacturing. There are so many limitations you don’t realize until you see the process firsthand, and I believe that kind of exposure will help us become better engineers.”
Clean Room Classifications and Applications
Clean rooms are classified according to the ISO standard, which categorizes environments based on the concentration of airborne particles per cubic meter. The scale ranges from ISO Class 1 — the cleanest, used in semiconductor and nanotechnology applications — to ISO Class 9, used for less stringent research.
Within the clean room suite of NDSU’s Research 2 building, two primary clean room classifications are utilized:
- ISO Class 5 (Class 100): Allows a maximum of 100 particles ≥0.5 micrometers per cubic foot. This is the third-cleanest classification under the ISO system.
- ISO Class 7 (Class 10,000): Permits up to 10,000 particles ≥0.5 micrometers per cubic foot and ranks as the fifth-cleanest level.
These clean room environments are essential for electronics manufacturing research and testing. In such processes, microscopic contaminants can interfere with device fabrication, so a controlled, ultra-clean environment is crucial. Clean rooms help ensure repeatability, reliability, and high-quality standards in production.
The ISO Class 5 area supports photolithography, film deposition, water cleaning and etching. Past and present projects in this lab include sensor arrays on glass, micro-hotplates, microfluidic mixing chambers, solar cells, repacked microchips, platinizing micro-pipettes and thin-film transistor (TFT) fabrication.
The ISO Class 7 (Class 10,000) clean room applications include integrated circuit packaging, surface mount technology, screen printing, testing, failure analysis and electroplating. Projects in this area involve sensing systems for border security, custom circuit boards for senior design projects, high-volume semiconductor die packaging and experimental alternative packaging solutions for custom dies.
“NDSU’s clean rooms offer a unique asset to campus researchers and industry partners, which in turn helps demonstrate how important our partnerships are to advancing economic and workforce development for regional employers,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a great example of the interplay between research, industry and students.”
“The clean room tour provided the students from the NDSU electrical and computer engineering Digital Logic Design course with an up-close learning tool that will benefit them after graduation. Students are at the center of hands-on learning at NDSU,” Strommen said. “Actively doing tours helps prepare the students to support our local and regional companies. Students from the Digital Logic Design class recently witnessed the processing required to fabricate the electronics they are learning to design. They experienced a clean room firsthand and witnessed the importance of maintaining cleanliness. Seeing it firsthand is certainly different from seeing this on a computer screen. This hands-on experience will allow our students to gain more knowledge.”
