Hyun-hoon Lee, a Ph.D. student in POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering advised by Professor Young-joo Lee, received a Corporate Special Award at the 21st Korea Semiconductor Design Contest. Co-recipients were Ph.D. students Dong-yoon Gam and Young-hoon Byun and master's student Jong-min Park.

The team proposed a new noise-resilient image recognition algorithm for on-device CNN processing and developed several software/hardware co-optimization techniques for ultralow-power operation. Implemented on an FPGA, the system was highly regarded for improving computational complexity by more than a factor of 20 over existing approaches.

The contest attracts more than 100 participants annually and is considered Korea's most prestigious system semiconductor design competition. Professor Lee's laboratory has produced major award recipients every year since 2017, continuing its strong record in digital system semiconductor design.