SNU ECE research team led by Professor Jerald Yoo develops skin-adhesive wearable system that measures ECG signals without batteries - Proposes body-coupled wireless power supply technology that ensures human safety and stability - Addresses power supply challenge, a key obstacle to the commercialization of wearable devices ▲ (From left) Professor Jerald Yoo, Dr. Zhuoyue Li, and integrated M.S.-Ph.D. candidates Kyungsoo Park, Donghan Kim, and Gwangjin Kim Professor Jerald Yoo’s research team in the ECE Department announced that it has developed “SkinECG,” a skin-adhesive wearable healthcare system capable of measuring electrocardiogram signals without a battery. By combining energy harvesting technology with body-coupled power transfer, the research team proposed a new solution to one of the biggest challenges in the commercialization of wearable devices: power supply. The research was published on May 1 in Science Advances, an international academic journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). ■ Research Background Wearable healthcare systems are gaining attention as next-generation medical technologies that can measure biological signals in real time through sensors worn on the body and detect early signs of disease. A representative example is the electrocardiography (ECG) sensor. ECG sensors measure electrical signals generated by the heart and are essential for identifying cardiovascular diseases such as arrhythmia. However, batteries remain a major obstacle to the commercialization and long-term use of wearable devices. Due to their size and weight, batteries reduce wearability, and when they are discharged, biological signal collection may be interrupted. They also require periodic charging and replacement, causing inconvenience for users and making long-term continuous monitoring of biological signals difficult. To address this issue, previous studies have attempted to apply energy harvesting technology to wearable devices. Energy harvesting converts ambient energy, such as light, heat, and movement, into electricity. However, there has been a mismatch between the location where a wearable sensor must be attached and the location where energy can be efficiently harvested. For example, ECG sensors are generally attached to the chest, while power-generating devices such as solar cells are more efficient when attached to areas such as the arms or legs, where they can receive sunlight. In other words, the optimal location for generating electricity does not necessarily match the location where biological signals need to be measured. ■ Research Achievements To overcome this fundamental limitation, Professor Yoo’s research team proposed a new power supply architecture that wirelessly delivers power generated by multiple energy-harvesting devices attached to the human body to a remote ECG sensor. In the paper, this technology is referred to as an Orthogonal Energy Harvesting Network (O-EHN). SkinECG consists of an ECG sensor, which integrates a flexible circuit board and semiconductor chip on a skin-adhesive hydrocolloid patch, and a multi-energy wireless power supply network that delivers power generated by multiple energy-harvesting devices to the sensor. ▲ Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of battery-free wearable power supply technology The system operates by converting ambient energy into electricity through one or more energy-harvesting devices and then wirelessly supplying that power to an ECG sensor on the chest through body-coupled power transfer technology. Each power-generating device is designed to transmit power at an orthogonal frequency, allowing the number and placement of devices to be flexibly adjusted while ensuring stable power delivery to the ECG sensor. Professor Yoo’s team also overcame the limitations of conventional wireless power transfer methods. Conventional approaches transmit power by radiating electromagnetic waves through the air, but when used near the human body, electromagnetic waves may be absorbed or scattered by the body, reducing efficiency. The research team instead focused on transmitting power along the surface of the skin rather than radiating it over a distance. Using body-coupled powering, the team successfully delivered power generated by devices attached to the body to the ECG sensor on the skin without wires. The system was also designed so that power signals from multiple energy-harvesting devices do not interfere with one another by using distinct frequency channels, enabling stable power delivery to the sensor. In particular, the research team limited the level of power coupled to the human body to a level comparable to what people are routinely exposed to from surrounding electronic devices and everyday environments. The system was operated under low-power conditions designed with human safety in mind. Through this, the team demonstrated that an ECG sensor can be powered solely by energy harvesting, without batteries or wires. ■ Expected Impact The development of SkinECG is expected to mark an important turning point in solving the power supply challenge for next-generation wearable healthcare systems. This technology can also be applied not only to ECG monitoring, but also to long-term monitoring of various biological signals, including electromyography and electroencephalography. Furthermore, it is expected to develop into a foundational technology for addressing power supply challenges in wearable electronics and implantable medical devices. In addition, because the technology reduces constraints on the number and placement of energy-harvesting devices and can be combined with existing commercial energy harvesting technologies, it offers strong potential for expansion into a wide range of future wearable healthcare devices. ■ Researchers’ Remarks Professor Yoo explained, “Wearable healthcare devices have faced a fundamental limitation: the location where ambient energy can be effectively harvested and the location where biological signals must be measured are often different. This research addresses that problem by wirelessly delivering power along the surface of the human body.” He added, “We limited the power level delivered to the human body to a level comparable to everyday exposure, taking safety into account. Through this, we demonstrated that stable power can be supplied to ECG sensors without heavy and bulky batteries. In the future, this technology could be expanded not only into a multimodal digital healthcare platform that powers various biological signal sensors, such as electromyography and electroencephalography sensors, but also into a foundational power supply technology for a wide range of wearable devices.” ■ Researcher Career Path The first author of the paper, Dr. Zhuoyue Li, received her Ph.D. in February 2026 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS) under the co-supervision of Professor Jerald Yoo and worked as a visiting researcher at Seoul National University. Co-authors Kyungsoo Park, Donghan Kim, and Gwangjin Kim are conducting research in the field of body area networks (BAN). This study was conducted as an international joint research project led by Professor Jerald Yoo’s research team at Seoul National University, with participation from the University of Tokyo and the National University of Singapore. ▲ Figure 2. Implementation and demonstration of a battery-free skin-adhesive wearable system A solar cell-based wireless power supply module (left) and a skin-adhesive ECG sensor (center) were attached to the human body. The team successfully measured ECG signals while wirelessly supplying power without a battery (right). [Reference] - Paper/Journal : SkinECG: An orthogonal remote powering wearable skin-like sensor, Science Advances - DOI : https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec9803 - Chosun Ilbo (2026. 05. 20) : Wearable System Developed to Measure ECG Signals Without Batteries - Hankook Ilbo (2026. 05. 29) : Energy Harvesting, a Solution to the Charging Problem, Could Become Part of Everyday Life Within Five Years [Contact] Professor Jerald Yoo / High-Performance Integrated Microsystems Laboratory / 02-880-1776 / jerald@snu.ac.kr Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57886 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

■ Research Background Photonic integrated circuits are gaining attention as a next-generation technology capable of processing information quickly and efficiently using light. In particular, in the fields of data centers, optical communications, and optical computing, technologies that go beyond simply transmitting optical signals at high speed are becoming increasingly important. These include synchronizing the arrival times of multiple signals and delaying signals when needed. To realize these functions, researchers have studied coupled-resonator-induced transparency (CRIT) structures, which use interference between multiple optical resonators. CRIT is an optical phenomenon that selectively transmits light within a specific frequency band and, in the process, can slow down the propagation speed of optical signals. However, conventional CRIT structures are largely fixed once fabricated, making it difficult to reconfigure the same circuit for different functions when application requirements change. For example, to delay optical signals for a longer period or shift them to a certain frequency band, a new optical device tailored to that specific function had to be designed. As such, optical communication equipment and data center systems have become more complex, while adding new functions has required significant time and cost. In environments such as AI servers and next-generation data centers, where massive amounts of data must be processed in real time, this lack of flexibility has been regarded as a major obstacle to the advancement of optical computing technologies. ■ Research Achievements To overcome this limitation, the joint research team proposed a new approach that treats the two optical states that constitute a CRIT system—the bright mode and the dark mode—as a unified system. The team also introduced two controllable loop couplers and established a new design principle for a programmable photonic integrated circuit that can reconfigure optical resonator structures, which were previously difficult to modify after fabrication, depending on specific requirements. The researchers came up with a new CRIT structure capable of delaying and controlling the flow of light and demonstrated that optical interference between the bright and dark modes can be treated as a single design variable. This significantly expands the design freedom of optical resonator circuits, whose structures had previously been fixed. In particular, the team proved that two loop couplers can be used to control the width and shape of the frequency band through which optical signals pass, as well as the delay and transmission characteristics of optical signals traveling through the circuit. This means that the propagation speed and transmission characteristics of optical signals can be freely reconfigured not only in a single optical resonator, but also across an entire structure composed of multiple connected resonators. The researchers also numerically demonstrated how the propagation speed of optical pulses changes in real time while the circuit is being actively controlled. As a result, they confirmed that the delay time of optical signals can be freely adjusted while largely maintaining signal-processing performance. They also verified that the frequency components of light can be converted without adding any special devices. Furthermore, through three-dimensional electromagnetic field simulations, the research team verified that the proposed CRIT device can be implemented on a silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) photonic integrated circuit platform. They also analyzed various factors that may arise during actual fabrication and operation, including material loss, variations in resonator quality, backscattering, changes in coupling characteristics, phase errors in loop couplers, and thermal crosstalk. The results confirmed that the proposed structure can operate stably even in realistic photonic integrated circuit environments. ■ Expected Impact This research is significant because it presents a new programmable photonic integrated circuit platform that goes beyond the limitations of conventional fixed optical signal delay structures and enables the temporal and frequency characteristics of optical signals to be controlled even while the circuit is operating. In particular, the study demonstrates the possibility of implementing key functions required for next-generation optical interconnects—such as optical signal synchronization, variable delay lines, optical buffers, and light-frequency conversion—within a single photonic integrated circuit structure. The photonic integrated circuit design method proposed by the research team can also be extended beyond CRIT to the dynamic control of various resonator-based optical circuits. This suggests that the design principle could serve as a foundation for next-generation optical signal processing technologies that design and control the flow of light according to specific needs. If the proposed photonic integrated circuit is commercialized in the future, it is expected to allow the speed of optical signals to be adjusted as needed while enabling a single optical chip to switch among various functions like software. As such, the technology is expected to reduce power consumption and improve data processing efficiency in data centers and AI servers. Additionally, because various signal-processing functions can be integrated into a single optical chip, the technology could contribute to the miniaturization and cost reduction of optical communication equipment and sensor systems. In the long term, it is expected to serve as a core enabling technology in a wide range of industries that require ultrafast information processing, including autonomous driving, next-generation communications, and quantum technologies. - Paper/Journal: Fully programmable slow light based on a spinor representation of generalized coupled-resonator-induced transparency, Advanced Science - DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.76378 Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57876 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Professor Jaeyoung Do’s research team at the AIDAS Lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University announced that its paper, “VALUEFLOW,” which studies the alignment of large language models based on human values, has been accepted as an Oral Presentation at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026. ICML is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning. At ICML 2026, which will be held in Seoul, Oral Presentation is a presentation format granted only to outstanding research, accounting for approximately 0.7% of all submitted papers. Figure 1. Architecture of VALUEFLOW Large language models are increasingly being used in a wide range of high-risk and high-value domains, including education, healthcare, policy, and decision-making support. As a result, technologies that allow models to understand and adjust the human values and judgment criteria underlying their responses are becoming increasingly important, beyond simply following user preferences. The Need for Human Value-Based AI Alignment Existing AI alignment research has primarily adjusted models based on user preferences or feedback scores. However, preferences can easily change depending on how a question is asked or the context in which it is presented, making it difficult to stably reflect the values that individuals or groups fundamentally consider important. For example, even for the same issue, some users may prioritize fairness, while others may place greater importance on freedom or safety. To address these limitations, the research team proposed VALUEFLOW, an integrated framework that can represent, measure, and steer the responses of large language models from the perspective of human values. VALUEFLOW: An Integrated Framework Connecting Value Representation, Measurement, and Steering VALUEFLOW consists of three main stages. First, in the Value Representation stage, the framework integrates different value theories into a single structured embedding space through HiVES, a hierarchical value embedding model. This enables the model to capture value signals at the text level, including care, fairness, freedom, safety, rights, and responsibility, as defined in value systems such as Schwartz’s theory of basic values, moral foundations theory, and rights- and duty-based value frameworks. Second, in the Value Measurement stage, VALUEFLOW uses the large-scale Value Intensity Database (VIDB) and a comparison-based evaluation method to quantitatively assess not only whether a particular value is present, but also how strongly it is expressed. Third, in the Value Steering stage, the framework guides model responses to reflect specific value directions and intensities, while analyzing the steerability and limitations of each model. Figure 2. Comparison of value steerability across major LLMs. The figure shows differences in model responses to positive and negative value steering. Analyzing the Value Steerability of 10 Major Large Language Models Using VALUEFLOW, the research team evaluated the steerability of 10 major large language models, including GPT-4.1, Gemini, Claude, Qwen, Mistral, Gemma, and Grok, across 4 value theories and 32 value categories. The analysis revealed clear differences in value-steering capabilities across models. Some models responded well to positively reinforcing certain values but showed little response to steering in a negative direction. In particular, values generally considered socially desirable, such as care and universalism, showed strong resistance to negative steering. The team also found that when multiple values were steered simultaneously, similar values tended to be reinforced together, while conflicting values tended to weaken each other’s expression. This suggests that value alignment in large language models is not merely a matter of following instructions, but is closely connected to the models’ internal safety and alignment characteristics. VALUEFLOW can be applied to personalized AI, culture-specific AI alignment, policy-sensitive AI deployment, model auditing, and real-time dialogue-based alignment. In particular, because it can analyze which values a model reflects well and which values it resists, VALUEFLOW is regarded as a foundational technology for transparent and responsible AI development. This research was led by Woojin Kim of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University as the first author, with Sieun Hyeon and Jusang Oh as co-authors and Professor Jaeyoung Do as the corresponding author. The research team plans to expand VALUEFLOW to multi-turn dialogue-based personalized alignment, culture-specific value profiling, and multimodal AI alignment. Professor Do stated, “This research is meaningful because it presents a direction for large language models to move beyond simply following users’ immediate preferences and toward structurally understanding and steering the values that humans consider important. We will continue to develop this work into responsible AI alignment technology that enables the coexistence of diverse individual and societal values.” Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57850 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Won Hyo Jeong, a Ph.D. candidate in the Electric Energy Conversion Lab (EECL) led by Professor Jung-Ik Ha in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Outstanding Paper Award for Young Engineers at the 2026 International Power Electronics Conference, IPEC-Nagasaki 2026 -ECCE Asia-, held in Nagasaki, Japan, from May 31 to June 4. The award-winning paper, titled “Charge Pump Circuits for Negative Voltage Turn-Off in Gate Drivers,” presents a method for generating negative voltage for switch driving in high-voltage, high-current circuits using SiC (silicon carbide) switches without employing isolated DC-DC components. Held annually, ECCE Asia is one of Asia’s largest international conferences in the field of power electronics. The conference serves as a platform for sharing next-generation energy conversion technologies and the latest research achievements. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57823 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Professor Jonghyun Choi’s research team in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University has been selected for NVIDIA’s Academic Grant Program. The NVIDIA Academic Grant Program supports innovative artificial intelligence research at universities and accredited research institutions around the world. Selected through a review process, research teams receive access to the latest GPU infrastructure and research resources free of charge. As part of the program, Prof. Choi’s team will receive credits for approximately 34,000 hours of use on a Brev cloud platform node equipped with eight H100 80GB GPUs, as well as two RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q GPUs. Based on this support, the team plans to conduct research to improve the performance and generalization capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. VLA models are artificial intelligence models that understand visual information and language instructions and translate them into physical actions, effectively serving as the “brain” that enables robots to perform diverse tasks in various environments. Through this research, the team is expected to enhance the multi-task performance and generalization capabilities of VLA models and contribute to the development of core technologies in the field of Embodied AI. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57808 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Professor Jaeyoung Do’s research team at the AIDAS Lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University announced that its medical vision-language model (VLM), MEDIC-AD, has been accepted as an Oral Presentation and selected as an Award Candidate at CVPR 2026, one of the world’s most prestigious conferences in artificial intelligence and computer vision. MEDIC-AD was developed through clinical collaboration with Samsung Medical Center and joint research with the NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC), operated by NVIDIA, a global leader in semiconductors and AI. This research was designed to address a key limitation of existing medical AI models in that they possess broad medical knowledge but often lack the capabilities essential for real-world clinical practice, namely lesion detection, longitudinal symptom tracking, and visually explainable reasoning. Addressing Real Challenges in Clinical Practice MEDIC-AD focuses on solving three core tasks required in actual clinical settings: lesion detection, symptom tracking, and explainability. While most existing medical AI models have focused on acquiring vast amounts of medical knowledge, clinical practice requires more than knowledge alone. AI must be able to accurately identify abnormal lesions in medical images, determine whether a disease has improved or worsened compared with previous scans, and provide visual evidence that clinicians can verify. MEDIC-AD distinguishes itself from prior research by integrating all three capabilities into a single model. In particular, if AI can accurately classify patient progress as “no change,” “improved,” or “worsened” during follow-up, it can reduce the diagnostic burden on clinicians and help detect subtle changes at an early stage. The model is expected to have significant clinical impact, including the detection of early-stage lesions that may otherwise be missed and the rapid assessment of treatment response. Core AI Technology: Clinical Intelligence Built in Three Stages The key technical feature of MEDIC-AD is its stage-wise framework, a sequential learning structure composed of three stages. The first stage is anomaly detection. The research team inserted a new learning component, called an anomaly-aware token, into the transformer layers of the vision-language model. This token generates an Anomaly Attention Map, a probability map that distinguishes normal patches from abnormal patches, enabling the model to focus more effectively on lesion regions. Because this structure was trained across various imaging modalities, including brain MRI, head CT, and chest X-ray, the model can detect new diseases not included in the training data in a zero-shot setting. Figure 1. Architecture of the MEDIC-AD model The second stage is difference reasoning. Existing models typically process two images by simply concatenating them, which limits their ability to capture clinically meaningful changes over time. MEDIC-AD introduces a difference token that explicitly compares and separates anomaly features extracted from previous and current images of the same patient. This allows the model to precisely infer disease progression by identifying actual changes in lesions, without being misled by non-clinical variations such as overall brightness changes or differences in imaging angle. Figure 2. Example of MEDIC-AD evaluated on the MMXU benchmark. The model detects changes in findings between two X-ray images and visualizes the evidence behind its assessment. The third stage is visual explainability. To improve the reliability of AI-assisted diagnosis, the model must be able to show clinicians why it reached a particular conclusion. MEDIC-AD combines the tokens learned in the first stage with a ConvNeXt-based segmentation head to visualize, as a heatmap, the specific image regions that served as the basis for the model’s judgment. This is a key function that aligns the AI model’s conclusions with visual evidence, thereby improving clinical trust. Global Validation Through Joint Research with NVAITC In this research, collaboration with the NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) went beyond computing support. It involved joint research across large-scale model optimization and overall research direction. Collaboration with NVIDIA, which possesses world-class AI infrastructure and expertise, contributed to improving the model’s robustness and global competitiveness. On the clinical data side, the team obtained long-term follow-up chest X-ray data from 300 real patients through collaboration with Professor Pa Hong’s research team at Samsung Changwon Hospital. Unlike typical AI studies that train and evaluate models on public benchmark datasets, this study validated model performance using data collected from real hospital workflows, further strengthening its potential for clinical application. Superior Performance Compared with Global Models Including GPT-4o and Claude The results showed that MEDIC-AD outperformed existing medical AI models as well as leading global large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5, across all three tasks: lesion detection, symptom tracking, and visual explainability. In particular, on MMXU, a benchmark for disease-change analysis based on long-term clinical data, MEDIC-AD achieved an overall accuracy of 65.5%, substantially outperforming next-generation foundation models such as Lingshu at 62.0% and Citrus-V at 57.1%. In the visual explainability metric mIoU, which evaluates heatmap quality, MEDIC-AD achieved a score of up to 87.6, far exceeding competing models such as Citrus-V, which recorded an mIoU of 32.6. This research was conducted by Woohyeon Park, Jaeik Kim, and Sunghwan Cho of the ECE Department at SNU, with Professor Jaeyoung Do serving as the corresponding author. The study was also selected as an exemplary case of the government’s Supplementary Budget High-Performance Computing Support Program. The research team plans to expand this work into next-generation multimodal medical foundation models that integrate medical imaging, clinical text, and patient data. Professor Do stated, “This research is meaningful because it goes beyond simply improving the performance of medical AI. It implements the actual clinical diagnostic process—detection, comparison, and explanation—inside the AI model itself. Through continued collaboration with hospitals and industry, we will work to develop trustworthy AI technologies that make tangible contributions to patient diagnosis and treatment.” Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57783 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

The Applied Superconductivity Center at Seoul National University, led by Professor Seungyong Hahn of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Electric Power Research Institute, announced that it has signed a three-phase joint research agreement worth £10.17 million (approximately KRW 20 billion) with UK Industrial Fusion Solutions (UKIFS), a wholly owned subsidiary of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) that leads the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) program. STEP is a major strategic national infrastructure project led by UKAEA. It aims to build a 100 MW-class commercial fusion power plant by the early 2040s, capable of supplying electricity to more than 200,000 four-person households. In June 2025, the UK government confirmed West Burton in Nottinghamshire as the construction site and announced an investment of £2.5 billion (approximately KRW 4.9 trillion) over five years to advance fusion energy development.* * Source: Major funding milestone for world-first prototype fusion plant - STEP Fusion The Applied Superconductivity Center and UKAEA laid the groundwork for this project through Phase 1 and Phase 2 joint research conducted over approximately two years, beginning in June 2024. In Phase 1, the team designed and fabricated a 3.6-meter-class, high-current, high-temperature superconducting cable prototype, achieving world-class performance and reliability. In Phase 2, the team developed manufacturing equipment for long-length cable production applicable to actual fusion magnets. In particular, the fabricated cable prototype underwent performance testing in July 2025 at the SULTAN test facility under the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. As a result, the prototype achieved the facility’s operational limits of an external magnetic field of 10.9 T and an operating current of 91 kA, corresponding to an electromagnetic force* of 100 tons per meter. The cable also demonstrated high reliability, with no performance degradation observed after more than 1,400 repeated charge-discharge cycles and intentional quench accident tests. This represents an unprecedented achievement in the field of high-temperature superconducting cables since the SULTAN ((German) SUpraLeiter Test ANlage) facility began operation in 1992. Furthermore, key performance indicators, including temperature-dependent critical current predictions, matched the values predicted in advance by analysis software independently developed by the SNU research team, demonstrating the precision of the team’s design technology. * Electromagnetic force: the product of current, perpendicular magnetic field, and length In Phase 2 of the research collaboration, which began in July 2025, the team moved beyond the conventional manual fabrication method for high-temperature superconducting cables and developed dedicated manufacturing equipment for long-length cable production required for future fusion magnets. In the newly agreed Phase 3 collaboration, the goal is to fabricate a 3-meter-scale prototype of a Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) for fusion applications. This Phase 3 collaboration is expected to serve as an important turning point in raising the technology readiness level (TRL) of STEP’s high-temperature superconducting magnet technology, as the scope of cooperation has significantly expanded beyond the laboratory scale to long-length cable production using the team’s self-developed specialized manufacturing equipment and ultimately to the fabrication of a TFMC prototype. Behind these achievements is the work of the Project for Research and Innovation in Superconducting Magnet (PRISM), also known as the High-Temperature Superconducting Magnet Core Technology Research Group. PRISM is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea under the Ministry of Science and ICT and led by the Applied Superconductivity Center at Seoul National University. The group is headed by Sangjin Lee, visiting professor in the ECE Department at SNU. Launched in 2022, PRISM carries out the High-Temperature Superconducting Magnet Technology Development Project from April 2022 to December 2026, under the vision of “the nation as one research institute and one university.” With a total budget of KRW 46.4 billion over five years, the project brings together 27 industry, university, and research institutions and more than 220 researchers. The group has systematized high-temperature superconducting magnets, which can be applied across a wide range of manufacturing industries, into four major configurations and seven key technologies for the first time in the world, and is developing core original technologies for mass production and high-end commercialization. Based on the results of the ongoing prototype development, the research team is currently discussing plans to expand the number of fusion model magnet prototypes produced and to participate in the fabrication of the final STEP model magnet. This marks the first case in which Korean technology could be applied to a core system of an actual fusion reactor, going beyond the simple supply of components. The collaboration is expected to open opportunities for Korean researchers and deep-tech companies to enter various advanced industrial fields, including future high-temperature-superconductivity-based fusion reactor construction projects, as well as biotechnology and materials, medicine, national defense, advanced science, and future mobility. Ultimately, the results of Korea’s original high-temperature superconducting technology development are expected to become a key foundation not only for the achievements of individual research institutions, but also for the expansion of the broader domestic industrial ecosystem into the global market and for securing national strategic technological competitiveness. For this joint research with UKIFS, SNU formed a response team together with PRISM participating companies PowerNix Co., Ltd. (CEO Kwanghee Yun) and Standard Magnet Inc. (CEO Jaemin Kim). The team worked closely together throughout the entire process of designing, fabricating, and evaluating the cable prototype, producing excellent outcomes. These achievements are linked to the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “Deep Science Startup Activation Support Program” and are now leading to the establishment of a domestic company specializing in high-temperature superconducting systems for fusion energy, centered on the response team. This collaboration is also being carried out as part of the Seoul National University Energy Initiative (SNU-EI), led by Professor Sung Jae Kim of the ECE Department. Accordingly, beyond the development of high-temperature superconducting magnet technology for fusion power, which is expected to become one pillar of future electricity production, the project is expected to lay the groundwork for collaboration with energy experts in the production division under SNU-EI. Through this collaboration, the team aims to examine key enabling technologies and technological limitations that can accelerate the practical commercialization of fusion energy, while expanding into various forms of technical cooperation and derivative projects. ▲ Figure 1. (Left) Schematic of the STEP fusion reactor being developed by the UKAEA (Source: https://step.ukaea.uk/) (Right) Configuration of an HTS magnet system for fusion applications: (1) wire; (2) cable; (3) magnet; (4) system. The UKAEA-SNU joint research agreement is expected to expand from cables to magnets and systems. (Source: Wire - https://sunam2004.tradekorea.com/main.do; Cable - provided by SNU; Magnet - K. J. Chung et al., Design and Fabrication of VEST at SNU, presented at 16th International Workshop on Spherical Torus, Sep. 27-30, 2011.; System - https://actu.epfl.ch/news/welcome-mast-upgrade-a-new-fusion-device/) ▲ Figure 2. (Left) Prototype of dedicated manufacturing equipment for long-length cable production developed at SNU (Right) Installation of a 12-meter-long facility based on the prototype ▲ Figure 3. (Left) The SULTAN test facility managed by the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC) under EPFL in Switzerland. The facility outlined by the light-green frame on the right is SULTAN. (Source: https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/swiss-plasma-center/research/superconductivity/page-97675-en-html/) (Center) Photo of the HTS cable tested at the SULTAN facility. The cable achieved the facility’s operational limits of an external magnetic field of 10.9 T and an operating current of 91 kA, corresponding to an electromagnetic force of 100 tons per meter. (Right) Data recorded when the cable reached its maximum current, showing representative voltage (navy) and current (blue) in the high-field region of 10.9 T. The cable reached 91 kA at around 20 K. ▲ Figure 4. (Left) Equipment for fabricating a HTS cable former (Right) Photo of the fabricated 10-meter-class long-length cable former [Contact] - Professor Seungyong Hahn / 02-880-1495 / hahnsy@snu.ac.kr - Integrated M.S.-Ph.D. Candidate Dongwoo Lee / imdwl0830@snu.ac.kr [Reference] - STEP Website: https://stepfusion.com/uk-fusion-energy-strengthens-korea-partnership/ - College of Engineering Notice Board: https://eng.snu.ac.kr/communication/promotion/news?md=v&bbsidx=8075 - Maeil Business Newspaper Article: https://n.news.naver.com/article/009/0005682928?sid=105 Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57756 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

A paper by researchers Jong-Won Back and Sungho Park from Professor Jong-Ho Lee’s research team in Seoul National University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering was selected as the cover article for the June issue of Nano Energy (Impact Factor: 17.1), one of the world’s leading journals in the field of energy research. This research introduced a novel binary neural network architecture utilizing three-dimensional NAND flash memory, reducing energy consumption by approximately 98% compared to conventional architectures. The proposed approach also addressed limitations of previous designs that were susceptible to interference from neighboring data, resulting in improved computational accuracy. Given that 3D NAND flash memory is currently the most widely commercialized non-volatile memory technology, this work is expected to have significant implications for the development of low-power, high-performance neuromorphic computing systems based on commercially scalable memory platforms. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57782 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...