Internship Overview: During the summer 2026, I worked at GF as a Automotive End Market Engineer. This experience gave me a technical-business experience in one of the largest chip fab companies in the US and the world. The position felt very “startup-esquette” in that my role was to see how we can win customers over and utilize GF’s process node technologies to enter specific sectors of the market. GF focuses on the larger, general market chips within the chip industry, which have seen lots of supply chain shifts due to the ongoing AI shift. I focused on the Automotives End Market, and specifically looked at GF entering the automotive ethernet market.
Automotive Ethernet: Technical Market Analysis Work
My main goal through this internship was to analyze whether GF should enter the Automotive Ethernet space, and if so, how to do it.
To begin, I started doing technical research on the overall landscape of the automotive networking, including the evolution and shifts which create motivations towards the implementation automotive ethernet. Automotives have historically acted as mechanical systems which slowly started to implement sensors into the design to ensure better performance and safety. Ultimately however, they remained largely non-intelligent, and as more and more sensors begin to be added, a shift began towards software-defined vehicles (SDV). One major shift which needed to occur was with networking within the automotives themselves. Because SDVs require so much more sensing and computing capabilities, weight and cost began to see significant upturns. As a result, a more consolidated networking system was seen as necessary within automotives. Ethernet’s high bandwidth proved as a major advantage to alleviate this and is helping create the shift within automotives from a distributed architecture to what is known as a zonal design. Furthermore different bandwidths or standards of ethernet are being implemented into vehicles for specific functionalities each with their own designs.
This motivation provided ample evidence to investigate whether the technology is worth investing into, and so I started to do technical research on the overall ethernet architecture, from a system level all the way down to subcomponent levels, focusing specifically on how the technology shifts across standards, and what parts of the system require what technologies. After doing this, I looked at the different process nodes offered by GF, and was able to deduce what nodes would best fit each standard and ethernet device.
After analyzing the technical side of the device, I looked on whether it is worth investing in from a market research perspective. To do this, I performed a top-down and bottom-up SAM and TAM analysis, looking at each standard, and each process node utilized in the market over time, and how much manufacturing cost and pricing would be. I then looked into top customers who produce the technology and the market share shifts over time and how they are implementing and utilizing the technology.
Utilizing the market and technical research, I drafted a markets requirement document (MRD) for the GF team and presented it to the team and other key stakeholders in the project. This project overall gave me experience with learning the full flow of market development and allowed me to see how I could best utilize my technical skills to evaluate a product. Apart from just doing research, much knowledge is not listed publicly, so I met with customers to gain insights on how they are planning to utilize the technology and what process nodes they would be willing to utilize from GF. Thus through this experience I was able to gain a better understanding of how the customer business landscape works and how to engage effectively with potential clients.
