▲ Photo from the 32nd Samsung Humantech Paper Awards Ceremony Seoul National University’s College of Engineering announced that its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Department Chair: Professor Yongtaek Hong) received multiple awards at the 32nd Samsung Humantech Paper Awards, including the Special Prize and Gold Prize in the university category. The Samsung Humantech Paper Awards is an event hosted by Samsung Electronics and jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Science and ICT and JoongAng Ilbo. Established in 1994, the Samsung Humantech Paper Awards is a prestigious academic event designed to discover and foster outstanding talent—from high school through graduate school, both in Korea and abroad—poised to lead 21st-century science and technology. This year, a record-high 3,172 abstracts were submitted, and 120 teams were selected as final awardees. Continuing its strong track record, SNU ECE students received a total of seven awards this year, including two Gold Prizes. In particular, by earning the Special Prize awarded to the department with the most awards in the university division for the third consecutive year, the ECE Department once again demonstrated that it possesses research competitiveness at the highest national level and remains a leading force in Korea’s electrical and computer engineering fields. This achievement reflects not only the excellence of individual students but also the department’s collective research capacity. Securing the top departmental distinction for three consecutive years underscores the sustained and systematic cultivation of research excellence and talent development within the department. The Samsung Humantech Paper Awards consist of individual prizes for researchers and special prizes awarded to universities and academic advisors demonstrating exceptional research outcomes. This year, students from the laboratories of Professors Jinho Lee, Saewoong Bahk, Woo-Seok Choi, Kyunghan Lee, and Jaehyouk Choi delivered particularly outstanding results. Among the five divisions related to electrical and computer engineering, the department secured Gold Prizes in ‘Communication & Networks’ and ‘Signal Processing’, as well as Silver Prizes in ‘Circuit Design’ and ‘Computer Science & Engineering’. These achievements highlight not only the breadth of research output across the discipline but also its top-tier qualitative excellence, underscoring the department’s leading competitiveness in the field of electrical and computer engineering. Kanghyun Choi (Advisor: Prof. Jinho Lee) received the Gold Prize in the Signal Processing division for proposing FALQON, a novel framework that eliminates the overhead incurred during LoRA fine-tuning with FP8 quantization, achieving up to a threefold improvement in training speed. Goodsol Lee (Advisors: Prof. Saewoong Bahk and Prof. Kyunghan Lee) was awarded the Gold Prize in the Communication & Networks division for developing QCON, a RAN scheduling technique that maximizes Quality of Experience (QoE) for real-time video streaming by leveraging the multi-connectivity feature of existing commercial 5G networks at no additional cost. The approach was experimentally validated on an Open-RAN testbed. In addition, Kahyun Kim (Advisor: Prof. Woo-Seok Choi) and Hongsun Jang (Advisor: Prof. Jinho Lee) received Silver Prizes; Chanjeong Park (Advisor: Prof. Kyunghan Lee) received a Bronze Prize; and Junseok Lee (Advisor: Prof. Jaehyouk Choi) and Gibum Park (Advisor: Prof. Kyunghan Lee) were awarded Encouragement Awards. Professor Yongtaek Hong, Chair of the ECE Department, stated, “Being selected as the department with the most awards in the university category for three consecutive years is the result of our students’ exceptional research capabilities, the dedicated mentorship of our faculty, and the department’s robust research support system. We will continue to encourage creative and ambitious research while fostering world-class research talent.” Detailed award information is as follows. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57524 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

On December 1, 2025, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering held an invited seminar recognizing 12 graduate students who received awards at major domestic and international competitions, including the Samsung HumanTech Paper Awards. During the event, the awardees delivered presentations on their research achievements, and the department conferred upon them the “Graduate Student of the Year Award.” The department plans to continue organizing similar events on a quarterly or semester basis to encourage and recognize outstanding academic accomplishments among its graduate students. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57473 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Yuhwan Shin, a Ph.D. candidate in the Integrated Circuits and Systems Labo (ICSL) led by Professor Jaehyouk Choi, has been selected as a recipient of the 2025-2026 Pre-Doctoral Achievement Award from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS), a leading global academic society in the field of semiconductor circuit design. The Pre-Doctoral Achievement Award is presented annually by IEEE SSCS to a select group of graduate students worldwide who demonstrate exceptional research accomplishments and outstanding academic potential. The award is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious honors for emerging scholars in the solid-state circuits community. Shin was recognized for his innovative research contributions on low-power clock generation and distribution circuits and high-bandwidth transceiver technologies for next-generation memory interfaces. Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57476 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Highest Honors in the Asia-Pacific Region at ISSCC First SNU Recipient in 20 Years (From left) Professor Jaehyouk Choi, ISSCC Conference Chair Edith Beigne, Researcher Jeongbeom Seo, and Researcher Yuhwan Shin. [College of Engineering, Seoul National University] A research team from the College of Engineering at Seoul National University has received the highest paper award in the Asia-Pacific region at what is widely known as the “Olympics of semiconductor design,” marking the university’s first such achievement in 20 years. On February 19, SNU’s College of Engineering announced that the research team led by Professor Jaehyouk Choi (Jaehyouk Choi, Jeongbeom Seo, Yoonseo Cho, and Yuhwan Shin) from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering received the Takuo Sugano Award, the highest honors in the Asia-Pacific region, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). ISSCC, organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is the world’s premier conference in semiconductor circuit design and is often referred to as the “Olympics of semiconductor design.” The Takuo Sugano Award is presented to the most outstanding paper from the Asia-Pacific region, selected based on technical excellence and academic impact. This year, 165 papers from the region were considered. ISSCC evaluated Professor Choi’s team’s research as achieving approximately a tenfold improvement in the power efficiency of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). According to the conference, the work proposes a solution to HBM’s power consumption and thermal challenges by introducing a circuit design technique that reduces power consumption to less than one-tenth of conventional approaches. The research proposes a novel circuit architecture for HBM. Instead of distributing high-frequency multi-phase signals in parallel, as in conventional designs, the team transmitted phase information sequentially using a single low-frequency signal. The phase information is then restored immediately before data input/output operations. This approach significantly reduces heat generation in HBM systems while maintaining performance. Ph.D. candidate Jeongbeom Seo, the first author of the award-winning paper, stated, “I am deeply honored to have developed a technology that can make a meaningful contribution to the advancement of HBM, a core component of Korea’s semiconductor industry. I will continue to pursue research with a strong sense of responsibility to further strengthen the global competitiveness of our domestic semiconductor industry amid rising international competition.” (From left) Jeongbeom Seo, Yoonseo Cho, Yuhwan Shin, and Professor Jaehyouk Choi. [College of Engineering, Seoul National University] Source: https://n.news.naver.com/mnews/article/009/0005638876?sid=101 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

Image: Professors and awardees Top row (from left): Professor Jae-Joon Kim, Professor Taesup Moon Bottom row (from left): Ph.D. Candidate Hyeseong Jeon, Ph.D. Candidate Dohoon Kim Dohoon Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Intelligence and Data Science Lab (advised by Professor Taesup Moon), and Hyeseong Jeon, a Ph.D. candidate in the Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) Lab (advised by Professor Jae-Joon Kim), both in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University, were selected as final Winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea (QIFK) 2025. The results were announced at the final event held on November 27. QIFK is a scholarship and research support program organized by Qualcomm for graduate students in Korea, designed to identify and support outstanding research in the field of AI through research funding and fellowships. More than 120 research submissions were received for this year’s program, from which 15 were ultimately selected as Winners. Hyeseong Jeon proposed a fine-tuning methodology for quantized models aimed at enabling efficient inference in task-specific large language models (LLMs). Departing from the conventional “quantization-then-fine-tuning” paradigm, the proposed approach performs quantization concurrently with fine-tuning. This method was shown to maintain high model accuracy while significantly improving inference speed. Image: Overview of Hyeseong Jeon’s research Dohoon Kim introduced a novel learning architecture that enables the parallel acquisition of multiple types of domain knowledge and their efficient integration and utilization. The proposed framework achieves superior performance with substantially lower computational cost compared to existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Image: Overview of Dohoon Kim’s research Image: Group photo of the Winners Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57154 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

SNU ECE Professor Woo Young Choi’s research team named to the 2025 National R&D Top 100 Achievements Reliability breakthrough via 3D NEM memory integration in CMOS interconnect layers Proposition of next-generation ultra-low-power, high-reliability semiconductor device platform ▲ Professor Woo Young Choi’s research team, College of Engineering, Seoul National University The College of Engineering at Seoul National University announced that the 3D-integrated CMOS–NEM memory technology developed by Professor Woo Young Choi’s research team in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been selected for the 2025 National Research and Development (R&D) Top 100 Achievements. Prof. Choi’s team successfully addressed the long-standing reliability challenges that have hindered the practical adoption of NEM devices by introducing a novel approach that directly integrates nanoelectromechanical (NEM) memory devices three-dimensionally within CMOS interconnect layers previously used only passively, while preserving the intrinsic advantages of NEM technology, including ultra-low power consumption, zero leakage current, and abrupt switching behavior. In particular, the core achievement selected for inclusion in the 2025 National R&D Excellent Achievements Top 100 is a NEM memory device featuring a Torsional-Via-Assisted (TVA) anchor structure that allows controlled torsional motion. This design effectively disperses mechanical stress concentration arising from repeated operation, experimentally demonstrating approximately a fivefold improvement in durability and stable operational characteristics compared to conventional structures. The technological significance of this work was formally recognized through its selection as the cover article of the December 2024 issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters, a leading international journal in the field. Notably, the proposed structure leverages vias already used in standard CMOS back-end interconnect processes, enabling a dramatic enhancement in reliability without additional area overhead or process cost. Furthermore, the team demonstrated the feasibility of implementing physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and associative memory using NEM memory devices, with these results published as cover articles in the July and September 2025 issues of Advanced Intelligent Systems, respectively. ▲ Electron microscope image of the via-anchor-based 3D CMOS–NEM memory structure and corresponding journal cover 2025 National R&D Top 100 Achievements Article Link: https://biz.chosun.com/science-chosun/science/2025/12/22/YTF3XQS275GMLPJOJXXX62WNEU/?utm_source=naver&utm_medium=original&utm_campaign=biz Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57141 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

At this year’s ICT Paper Competition, innovative research across a broad range of fields—including AI semiconductors, neuromorphic computing, generative AI, mobility, VR/AR, large language model (LLM) systems, and next-generation displays—were selected as award-winning entries. The winning papers were chosen through a comprehensive evaluation based on originality of ideas, theoretical rigor, experimental validation, performance assessment, and potential future impact. Jae Seung Woo (Seoul National University) The Grand Prize was awarded to Jae Seung Woo for his research on ultra-fast, low-power synaptic learning implemented using a 3-transistor (3T) embedded NOR flash memory architecture based on a 28 nm CMOS process. The proposed structure alleviates bottlenecks in conventional memory-based neural networks while enabling stable weight modulation and high energy efficiency at the single-cell level. By demonstrating improvements in both process compatibility and performance, the work received high recognition for its strong applicability to future AI semiconductor and neuromorphic systems. Hyoseok Lee (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) The Excellence Award recipients Hyoseok Lee and Sohwi Lim identified the fundamental cause of artifacts and quality degradation in existing Latent Diffusion Inverse Solvers, which stems from unstable reverse-diffusion dynamics. To address this issue, their paper proposes a Measurement-Consistent Langevin Corrector (MCLC) that reduces distribution mismatch at each time step. This research presents a new direction that substantially improves both the stability and quality of LDM-based zero-shot inverse solvers. Juhee Heo (Sookmyung Women’s University) Another Excellence Award recipient, Juhee Heo, presented a highly contemporary and impactful study by integrating quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) with reinforcement learning (PPO) to jointly consider detection, transmission, reliability, and freshness. In addition, the proposed predictive-based (proactive) information delivery framework for enhancing Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) safety offers a meaningful research direction with strong potential for further studies in future 6G-based intelligent transportation infrastructures. Johnghyun Ko (Seoul National University) The Distinguished Award recipient Jonghyun Ko was recognized for research that proposes a new direction for generative AI hardware by implementing both probabilistic sampling and deterministic computation within a single device using HfO₂-based ferroelectric tunnel junctions. By realizing latent-space sampling at the hardware level, the study is expected to have significant academic and technological impact on next-generation intelligent semiconductor research, considering its creativity and scalability. Minhyuk Kim (Kyung Hee University) Distinguished Award recipients Minhyuk Kim and Junhyeong Shim addressed the fundamental trade-off in VR streaming between high-resolution delivery and increased encoding latency by leveraging user attention prediction. Rather than relying solely on conventional foveated streaming approaches that consider only gaze location, their work introduces a novel design framework based on attention-probability-driven grid merging and adaptive resolution allocation, greatly enhancing the feasibility of real-world system implementation. Jeongwoo Kim (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology) Distinguished Award recipients Jeongwoo Kim and Jaehun Lee reexamined caching strategies for large language model service systems. Existing approaches—such as exact-match, prefix, and semantic caching—are inefficient due to neglecting query semantics or relying on traditional heuristics. Their study proposes a centroid-based caching method to efficiently manage redundant queries, along with a cache replacement strategy that accounts for semantic locality and dynamically adjusts cache hit rates to balance accuracy and latency under varying workloads. Hyunwook Cho (Pohang University of Science and Technology) Distinguished Award recipients Hyunwook Cho, Donghyuk Kim, Yonggon Park, Seunghoon Oh, Sangbu Yoon, and Jaeyong Lee presented an innovative approach to addressing the ECC decoding bottleneck encountered during tiny-read operations in SSDs by reusing Locally Correctable Codes (LCC). Achieving more than a 60% reduction in read latency without requiring additional hardware modifications, the work was highly praised for both its creativity and practicality. Hyunsu Jung (Kyungpook National University) Distinguished Award recipient Hyunsu Jung proposed a geometric-phase-based varifocal lens optical system that enables control over virtual content depth in AR devices. The system supports real-time, full-color AR images with multiple polarizations and depths, effectively addressing the vergence-accommodation conflict. The study includes concrete models and experimental demonstrations for full-color implementation, while minimizing the number of switching elements required for variable depth control. Soeun Lee (Yonsei University) Finally, Distinguished Award recipients Soeun Lee, Seokgyu Hong, Juhyun Lee, and Yongseon Hwang presented a study aimed at resolving the mobility–reliability trade-off of LTPO-grade oxide driving TFTs through a dual-channel structure combining ALD-IGO and sputtered IGZO. The work demonstrates high industrial impact and strong potential for extension to next-generation high-resolution, low-power display backplane devices, with a high level of completeness in both process development and analytical methodology. Source: https://m.etnews.com/20251216000203 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...

(From left) Professor Woo Young Choi and researcher Jaemin Yeom of the ECE Department at Seoul National University A paper authored by researchers Jaemin Yeom, Jae Seung Woo, and Jin Wook Lee from the Three-Dimensional Integration & Device Lab (TIDL) led by Professor Woo Young Choi has been selected as the cover article of the January 2026 Issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters (EDL). Founded in 1980, EDL is recognized as one of the world’s most influential journals, publishing original and significant contributions in the theory, modeling, design, performance, and reliability of semiconductor devices. Details of the paper selected as the cover article for this issue of EDL are as follows. January 2026 Issue (First Author: Jaemin Yeom): The study proposes a capacitive synapse architecture in which two ferroelectric capacitors operate as a differential pair, addressing the low sensing margin issue inherent to ferroelectric capacitors while enabling the implementation of ternary synaptic weights. (This research was supported by the Next-Generation Intelligence Semiconductor Foundation of the Ministry of Science and ICT.) Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57119 Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr...