Kyungrae Cho, a master’s student in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering (advisor: Professor Rock-Hyun Baek), presented “Improving Program Efficiency of 3D NAND Cell Structure Based on Artificial Neural Network” at the 2021 Summer Conference hosted by the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers and received the Best Paper Award with KRW 3 million.

The paper implemented a neural network that learns and predicts the relationship between 3D NAND cell structure and threshold-voltage distribution. It also proposed an algorithm to optimize an individual NAND cell quickly and accurately to achieve a target ISPP slope.

The Summer Conference covers seven fields: semiconductors, communications, computers, signal processing, systems and control, industrial electronics, and new emerging areas. Approximately 1,500 people attended the 2021 conference, where approximately 760 papers and lectures were presented.

For the Best Paper Award, three candidate papers in each field are selected from approximately 30 papers, after which presentation scores from the conference day are combined to identify the student who presented the best paper.

The award ceremony took place on July 1, 2021, at the 2021 Summer Conference held at the Lotte Hotel in Jungmun.