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