Integrated MS/PhD students Kyungjun Min, Moongyu Choi, and Junghyun Choi, together with six other members of POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering (advisor: Professor Seokhyeong Kang), achieved second place overall in this year’s MLCAD contest.

Jointly organized by NVIDIA and Arizona State University, the contest took place at the Machine Learning for CAD conference held September 8–10, 2025, in Santa Cruz, California. Twenty-seven teams from leading universities and companies, including Samsung, IMEC, NXP, UT Austin, Texas A&M, and CUHK, competed in AI-based VLSI electronic design automation.

This year’s topic was “Physical-Aware Logic Resynthesis for Timing Optimization Using AI,” requiring participants to optimize timing through AI-based logic resynthesis.

The CSDL team demonstrated outstanding ability by placing first on five of the twelve benchmark circuits and achieving a total score of 713. Fudan University placed first with 764 points, while NXP placed third with 482.

The result demonstrates POSTECH’s global competitiveness in semiconductor design automation and is expected to further enhance Korea’s standing in AI-based system semiconductor design.

September 2025.