POSTECH Electrical Engineering graduate students Seungho Han, Sunkyu Jeong, and Chanho Kim (advisor: Professor Byungsub Kim) received the President’s Award of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute at the 21st Korea Semiconductor Design Contest.

The team developed software that automatically generates layouts for analog and mixed-signal semiconductor circuits. Using this software, they demonstrated automatic generation of diverse high-speed wireline transmitter layouts across multiple semiconductor process nodes.

Layout design for analog and mixed-signal circuits generally requires designers to draw layouts manually, making technology development time-consuming and costly. As semiconductor processes shrink and design complexity increases, this design-productivity problem has long been a major obstacle to the semiconductor industry’s growth.

The study was highly regarded for opening the possibility of dramatically reducing the time and cost of developing analog and mixed-signal semiconductor circuits.

The Korea Semiconductor Design Contest has been held since 2000 to nurture design professionals and discover creative ideas. The 21st contest attracted 137 participants from 53 teams, the largest number since its inception. Professor Kim’s laboratory has consistently won awards at the contest since 2014.