Carolina Chip Fab

Carolina Chip Fab is the semiconductor division of R.A.M. Engineering. Members design, fabricate, and test devices themselves as members of a working lab rather than surveyors of the field. Our work is concretely designed in boards, process, measurements, and the slow judgments that come from watching a device fail and then building it again.

UNC is already strong in the pure sciences. Physics, chemistry, and materials research live here in depth. What has been thinner is a place for undergraduates to transofrm that knowledge into hardware: to coat a wafer, lay out a board, or stand up an experiment they can align with their own hands. We exist to close that gap.

Last semester, that meant engineering a spin coater built in-house, PCBs for FPV drone systems, neuromorphic boards, and microfluidic chips that are now moving forward with a private company. The through-line was the same: if the university does not already have the tool or the device, our teams try to make it.

This semester, our bench is a Stern–Gerlach experiment toward a 2-qubit quantum program, and a student fabrication lab with the Applied Engineering Laboratory, in the spirit of CMU’s HackerFab. In the spirit of what we believe as R.A.M. Engineering: elite engineering arrives on this campus when someone can walk in, pick up the work, and leave something the next team can run.