Dong-yoon Kam, a PhD student in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering (advisor: Professor Youngjoo Lee), won the Best Design Award (IEEE SSCS Seoul Chapter Award) at the International SoC Design Conference (ISOCC), hosted by the Institute of Semiconductor Engineers and officially sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

Kam studied ways to reduce decoding latency for polar codes, an error-correction code used in 5G communication systems. He developed the world’s first overlapped decoding algorithm to minimize the waiting time that occurs in conventional list-based approaches.

He also designed a dedicated system-on-chip solution tailored to the new algorithm using a 65 nm process, demonstrating a performance improvement of more than 30% over existing world-leading research.

At ISOCC, held in Yeosu beginning October 21, more than 60 entries were submitted to the chip design contest recognizing outstanding system semiconductor designs. Kam’s design received the highest evaluation and earned the Best Design Award.