POSTECH doctoral students Seungho Han and Chanho Kim, and Sungyu Jeong in the MS/PhD integrated program from the Department of Electrical Engineering (Advisor: Professor Byungsub Kim) have won the ETRI President Award at the 21st Korea Semiconductor Design Competition. This annual competition is hosted by the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association.

The research team successfully developed a software that automatically generates the layouts of the analog and hybrid semiconductor circuits, and created various layout designs for high-speed wire transmitters for diverse semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Until now, layout designs of analog and hybrid semiconductor circuits required lots of time and money to develop because the designers had to draw them one by one. In addition, as the semiconductor manufacturing process has become finer and the design more intricate, the issue of productivity has long been a major hindrance to the growth of the semiconductor industry.

Seungho Han’s research team was highly praised for opening up the possibility to drastically lowering the time and cost in developing the analog and hybrid semiconductor circuits.

The Korea Semiconductor Design Competition has been held since 2000 to train people in the field of design and to discover creative new ideas. This year, 137 people from 53 teams participated in the competition which was the biggest turnout ever. POSTECH professor Byungsub Kim’s lab has consistently won various awards at the competition since 2014.