SK Hynix has appointed Professor Jung Deog-kyoon, a semiconductor design expert at Seoul National University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to the position of exterior director. He is known as the “President's semiconductor instructor”. This move is seen as a strategic step towards strengthening the competitiveness of semiconductor designs, including high-performance DRAMs and system semiconductors.

Sources from the industry announced that SK Hynix has proposed the appointment of Professor Jung as an exterior director during the upcoming regular shareholders' meeting on May 29th. Professor Jung is considered as one of the top system semiconductor design experts in the country.

In 1995, after working as a researcher at the global semiconductor company Texas Instruments following the completion of his doctoral degree at UC Berkeley in the United States in 1958, he co-founded Silicon Image in the United States. This was only four years after he was appointed as a professor at Seoul National University in 1991.

Silicon Image succeeded in being listed on NASDAQ in 1999, leveraging its HDMI technology. Professor Jung donated a portion of the profits, specifically 1 million dollars (approximately KRW 1.3 billion), to Seoul National University.

When President Yoon visited Seoul National University in May 2021 during his presidential campaign, Professor Jung had a conversation with Jong-Ho Lee, the then-director of the Inter-University Semiconductor Research Institute (now Minister of Science and ICT), for about three hours. Currently, Professor Jung is serving as an exterior expert at the People Power Party's Special Committee on Strengthening the Competitiveness of the Semiconductor Industry, along with Professor Hwang Chul-seong of Seoul National University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Kim Jeong-ho of KAIST's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

SK Hynix's appointment of Professor Jung as an exterior director is seen as a move to enhance its competitiveness in the field of semiconductor design. Recently, there has been a trend towards 'heterogeneous integration' in which computational functions are added to DRAM, increasing the importance of design in memory semiconductors as well.

Source: https://ee.snu.ac.kr/community/news?bm=v&bbsidx=53557

Translated by: Do-Hyung Kim, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, kimdohyung@snu.ac.kr