Day in the life of a nano@stanford intern

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]My name is Connor Short and I am an intern here at the Nano facility at Stanford. I'm in my second year at Foothill Community College [music] studying electrical engineering and I'm planning on transferring in the fall.

[00:00:09]Cleanliness and personal protective equipment is very important for the lab environment. So, as interns, we need to make sure that those items are readily available for our lab members. The first thing that I do when I come to work before entering the lab is I'm going to check for any consumable items that need to be replaced from this area over here.

[00:00:26]So, we need medium latex gloves, we could use more large latex gloves. And then this has covers that will go over our shoulders.

[00:00:36]Just like that. So, here I have a cassette of clean wafers. So, myself and some engineers here, we cleaned these uh in one of our wet benches over on the other side of the lab. Essentially, what we're doing is trying to remove a native oxide layer from our wafer. I can pull one of these out for you.

[00:00:53]Here we have a 4-in silicon wafer. So, when we're making microchips, we're going to begin with a silicon wafer like this. There's a couple different processes that the interns will run here. The main one that we do is something called monitors. So, we're trying to monitor the tools to see how they're performing. We'll begin with a blank silicon wafer and then it will be run through one of our atomic layer deposition tools like Fiji 2 right here.

[00:01:15]Essentially, what we're doing there is running a process to grow an oxide layer onto our wafer. The other thing that we work on is our project. So, everybody's project can be different. For my projects, I've been tasked to try to optimize the pulse time on this tool here for the silicon precursor. This is the the access point that allows us to control the tool and we also have our different precursors on here. So, this is sort of the reaction chamber where our process is taking place.

[00:01:41]We'll load our silicon wafer onto the plate and we'll bring it inside of this chamber. Now, within this chamber, it's going to pulse our precursors and they will react within the chamber to grow a layer of whatever oxide we're looking for. One of the things that we have to do every day as well is restocking chemicals. Here is one of the solvents that we use, which is just uh 2-propanol, which is IPA or isopropyl alcohol. Lab members use this bench on a daily basis. They need to clean their wafers, they need to work on their process. So, we keep the spout facing away from us, and we turn from the bottle. Everything we do when working at any of the benches here must be under the fume hood and behind this line. This is for our safety. Having access to a facility like this has been a complete game-changer for my education. I've been able to take the things that I've learned and I've seen in textbooks, and I've been able to watch people perform those processes in real life.