Is my resume good enough for a chip design internship or am I wasting my time applying?

Future-dated project dates will hurt you, and not in the way you're thinking. A recruiter who glances at a resume and sees 2026 completion dates on half your projects either assumes you can't read a calendar or assumes you're padding, and both read badly. Move anything unfinished to a single line like 'currently building: X, Y' or just cut it. Nobody expects an intern to have a full portfolio, but nobody gives credit for things that don't exist yet either.

Those 'textbook exercises' got me my first contract work, but only after I stopped describing the RTL and started describing the verification. Rewrote my async FIFO bullet to be about the testbench I built, the corner cases I caught, and the coverage I ran, and suddenly interviewers had somthing to poke at. Turns out startups care way more that you know how to prove a design works than that you built a standard block everyone builds. Also for finding the small shops: I got mine by emailing an engineer whose talk I'd watched from a small FPGA conference and just asking if they were taking anyone on. Cold, but it worked.

What do you actually put on the resume when the class projects were done as part of coursework with a partner? Mine was a group thing and I never know if I should say 'I built the memory part' or just describe the whole thing like I did all of it. Feels like lying either way, one direction or the other.

On the startup hunting side, my first paid RTL work came from a post on SemiWiki, not any job board. A small ASIC shop was arguing about a clock domain crossing bug, I answered with a testbench I'd thrown togehter in an evening, and two weeks later the guy who ran the place messaged me. Niche forums beat the big boards here because the people posting are often the ones who'd actualy hire you, not HR filters.

One thing that changed my projects for me was switching to Verilator. Free and way faster than what I'd been using, so I could run real regressions and put actual numbers on my resume instead of just 'built an arbiter.' A number beats an adjective every time.

I'd push back a bit on the forum story above. Sure, someone landed contract work by dropping a testbench into a random thread, but that's one guy's lucky break, not a job search plan. A student with zero shipped designs posting in a thread full of senior engineers usally just gets ignored, or worse, corrected publicly. The forums are fine for learning and getting your name familiar, but the OP shouldn't treat that as the main channel. Cold emails to tiny startups with a link to actual working code on GitHub prolly converts better, even if it feels less clever. At least a hiring manager clicks that on thier own time.