Max spent the summer doing research at Deca and was hired onto the team — the exact "conversion" every intern hopes for. Deca is the leading independent provider of advanced packaging technology in the semiconductor industry.
Their M-Series™ platform is the industry's highest-volume fan-out technology — inside the smartphones in most people's pockets. Over 6 billion devices shipped using their technology.
thinkdeca.com →Traditional semiconductor lithography assumes every die lands in a perfect grid, in a perfect position, at a perfect angle. Reality never cooperates: dies drift, rotate, and warp during packaging. Traditional processes throw those parts out. That's the yield problem that eats a huge chunk of manufacturing cost.
Adaptive Patterning flips the model. Instead of forcing the pattern onto the die, it measures where every die actually is — then dynamically generates a custom lithography pattern that lines up with reality. The pattern adapts to the parts, not the other way around.
Result: variances and misalignments that would have been defects become… nothing. The pattern just absorbs them. Yield jumps. Cost drops. Chips get built that otherwise couldn't be.
This is not a small-detail improvement. Adaptive Patterning is one of the reasons Deca can ship packaging at the volume they do — over 6 billion devices in the field use it. It's a genuine "the industry needed this and they solved it" innovation. And Max is on the team.
Max is part of SCALE — Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement — the DoD-funded microelectronics workforce program (Purdue-led, national scope). SCALE trains US students in the exact skills the Department of Defense needs to secure its chip supply chain.
His subfield: Radiation Hardening. This is designing chips that keep working in space, satellites, missiles, and nuclear environments — where cosmic rays and gamma bursts would fry a normal consumer IC. It's a small, specialized field with a very tight talent pool.
Why this matters: rad-hard microelectronics engineers are a national-security specialty. The talent pipeline is deliberately small, salaries are strong, and many of the roles are cleared. Getting into SCALE as an undergrad is a signal — the department picked him for a program the DoD is funding to solve a real problem.
Max has been TA-ing Digital Design at Arizona State since his sophomore year — over two years and counting. UGTA slots at that level go to students who already own the material and can explain it clearly under pressure.
Two things this signals:
Max interned at Exquadrum (Victorville, CA — defense propulsion, since acquired by Mach Industries → Mach Energetics) for the summer of 2025 (May–Aug, 4 months).
His project: automating a laser-cut system designed to fabricate parts in space. Zero-gravity part-manufacturing is one of the open problems for long-duration space missions — you can't launch every replacement part from Earth. Max worked the industrial-control side: PLC ladder logic and Siemens PLC programming.
Notable: his brother Simon interned at the same company the same summer, on a completely different problem (built a local private LLM AI bot). Two engineers, one company, two very different projects.
50–60 miles per week runner. That is varsity-level mileage on top of a demanding EE curriculum, a real industry job, DoD-funded research, and TA duties. Most people can't sustain the physical load or the schedule discipline that requires.
Phi Kappa Tau (fraternity) and SnowDevils (ski/snowboard club) — because there also has to be some fun.
The kind of person who runs 50 miles a week while working at Deca, doing SCALE research, and teaching Digital Design is the kind of person who finishes what they start.
Simon is the aerospace software son — writing the flight brain of a self-landing rocket. Max is the silicon son — designing and packaging the chips themselves, including the ones that have to survive space. Different halves of the same problem, at the same university.
The Adaptive Patterning work at Deca is genuinely cool. It's the kind of process innovation that only exists because someone said "what if we adapted the pattern to the parts, instead of adapting the parts to the pattern?" — and then built the system that makes it work. Max is on that team as an undergrad.
Same drive as his brother. Different superpower.