A research team including Ph.D. candidate Young-Seok Lee (first author, co-advised by Professors Jungsuek Oh and Sangwook Nam), from the Wave Fusion Lab, led by Professor Jungsuek Oh, was the sole winner (1st place) of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE Wireless Power Technology Conference & Expo (WPTCE 2026). The event, hosted by IEEE, was held in Halifax, Canada, from July 6th to 9th.

Lee delivered an oral presentation titled "DC-to-DC Efficiency Maximization in Wireless Power Transfer with PA and Rectifier Nonlinearities via Semidefinite Relaxation." Following a review by the Technical Program Committee (TPC), he was selected as the singular winner out of 145 papers presented from 26 countries.

​The IEEE WPTCE is the world's largest international conference in the field of wireless power transfer, jointly organized by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) and the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS). The MTT-S's WPTC (inaugurated in 2013) and the PELS's WoW (inaugurated in 2015) were co-hosted as 'Wireless Power Week' starting in 2018, before officially merging into the single IEEE WPTCE conference in 2023. This marks the first time a researcher from a Korean institution has won first place since the conference's consolidation.

This paper departs from conventional methods that evaluate performance based solely on the RF power from the transmitting antenna to the receiving antenna. Instead, it proposes a framework for optimizing end-to-end efficiency—from the DC power consumed by the transmitting power amplifier (PA) to the DC power output from the receiving rectifier. As the first framework of its kind applied to a MIMO transceiver scenario, it is anticipated to provide an upper-bound guideline for end-to-end efficiency in future wireless power transfer systems. Commercially, it is expected to contribute to enhancing the efficiency of multi-antenna-based long-distance wireless charging, 6G ISAC MIMO, as well as drone and space solar wireless power transfer systems.

​Meanwhile, prior to the conference, Lee was selected for the IEEE MTT-S 'Student Travel Grant' (1,000 CAD). Furthermore, an extended study of this paper, titled "An End-to-End DC-to-DC Efficiency Optimization and Design Analysis for MIMO Wireless Power Transfer Systems," was accepted for publication on June 18th in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (TMTT), the most prestigious academic journal in the microwave field.

Source: https://ece.snu.ac.kr/ece/news?md=v&bbsidx=57917

Translated by: Changhoon Kang, English Editor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, changhoon27@snu.ac.kr