▲  Kyung Ho Eom and Seung Beom Gu, Ph.D. candidates from the BASIC Lab (Advisor: Professor Hyung-Min Lee) at the School of Electrical Engineering, are taking a commemorative photo after winning the Presidential Award and the Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office Award at the '24th Korea Semiconductor Design Contest' held in COEX, Samseong-dong, Seoul, on the 7th. (Photo provided by BASIC Lab)

Ph.D. candidates Kyung Ho Eom and Seung Beom Gu from the BASIC Lab (Advisor: Professor Hyung-Min Lee) from the School of Electrical Engineering, the College of Engineering, Korea University (Dean: Haigun Lee), proudly announced their achievement of winning the Presidential Award and the Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office Award at the '24th Korea Semiconductor Design Contest' held on the 7th at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul. The BASIC Lab also received the Presidential Award and the Minister of Trade, Industry, and Energy Award at last year's competition.

The 'Korea Semiconductor Design Contest' is a semiconductor design competition jointly hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy and the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association. It aims to cultivate design skills and discover creative ideas among university (graduate) students in the semiconductor design field. Many key figures leading the current semiconductor industry, such as semiconductor professors and fabless industry representatives, have also won awards at this event. A total of 52 entries were submitted to this year's contest.

The Presidential Award (Grand Prize) was won by  Kyung Ho Eom, a Ph.D. candidate from the School of Electrical Engineering, for his design titled "Low-Power, High-Resolution Sub-Retina Artificial Retina System-on-Chip Using Time-Based Light Detection Sensor with Wide Dynamic Range and Pixel-Level Dynamic Supply Voltage Adjustment." This award-winning project involves a human-implantable semiconductor chip designed to restore vision in blind patients by replacing damaged retinal cells. Unlike existing sub-retina artificial retinas, which had limitations in restoring vision due to problems such as the spread of stimuli within retinal cells, restricted light detection areas, and low stimulation power efficiency, this work applied advanced system semiconductor integrated circuit technology to maintain minimal pixel size while overcoming all three aforementioned issues. Additionally, electrodes were deposited on the semiconductor chip, and image projection tests and retinal cell stimulation experiments on rats were conducted. The award-winning work has been filed for patents in Korea and the United States and has been recognized for its creativity and excellence in design, being published in the most prestigious conference (IEEE ISSCC) and journal (IEEE JSSC) in the field of semiconductor integrated circuits.

Kyung Ho Eom expressed his joy, saying, "I am thrilled that our lab has won the Presidential Award for two consecutive years, last year and this year. I was able to achieve this honor thanks to the guidance of Professor Hyung-Min Lee, based on his profound knowledge of semiconductor integrated circuits, and the support of colleagues from BASIC Lab and other institutions involved in joint research." He also shared his aspirations, saying, "During my graduate studies, I have achieved good research results by studying integrated circuit technology applicable to implantable medical devices and biosensors. In the future, I would like to apply semiconductor integrated circuit technology to various integrated circuit fields. I aim to continue building and studying circuit design know-how to become a semiconductor circuit design expert."

The Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office Award (Bronze Prize) was won by Seung Beom Gu, a Ph.D. candidate from the School of Electrical Engineering, for his design titled "RF MEMS Sensor Drive/Measurement System-on-Chip for Portable Microplastic Detection Through Resonant Frequency Change and Adaptive Closed-Loop Envelope Control." This award-winning work proposed an MEMS sensor drive/measurement system-on-chip to overcome the limitations of spectroscopic methods such as Raman, TGA-FT-IR, which are currently used in domestic research labs to detect microplastics. Recently, microplastics have been detected in various environments, including infant feces and healthy human blood. This award-winning work is a circuit technology that measures changes in sensor capacitance depending on the presence of microplastics, aiming to detect microplastics occurring in real-life environments.

Seung Beom Gu shared his thoughts, stating, "I am very happy to receive such positive evaluations at the semiconductor design contest through research on a microplastic detection system-on-chip, especially at a time when studies are showing that microplastics are being detected inside the bodies of patients undergoing heart surgery." He also expressed his future ambitions, saying, "I will continue researching to advance the microplastic detection system-on-chip towards commercialization." /College of Engineering Newspaper