Three achievements of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at UNIST (President Yong-Hoon Lee) have been accepted for the 2024 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), also known as the ‘Semiconductor Design Olympics.’ ISSCC is the most prestigious conference in the field of semiconductor circuit design with a 70-year tradition.

According to the recently held 'ISSCC 2024 Korea Conference', UNIST had two projects adopted in the Imager, MEMS, Medical, and Display (IMMD) field and one project adopted in the Digital Architecture and Systems (DAS) field.

Two papers in the IMMD field came from the research teams of Professors Kim Seong-jin and Kim Jae-jun, and the paper in the DAS field came from the research team of Professor Lee Kyu-ho.

Professor Kim Seong-jin's team was selected for its low-power, ultra-small CMOS lidar sensor technology. This is a great achievement following the previous achievements in 2021 and 2022. The lidar sensor developed this time is half the size of the lidar sensor previously announced by the research team at ISSCC, consumes 21 times less power, and can provide high-resolution distance images of 160×120. It is expected that the size and power consumption of the lidar sensor, which is called the 'eye' of autonomous vehicles, will be reduced so that it can be used in mobile metaverse devices and service robots. This research was supported by Samsung Electronics DS Division and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Professor Lee Kyu-ho's team has developed the world's first ultra-low-power spatial information processing artificial intelligence system-on-chip (AI System-on-Chip) semiconductor that reduces power consumption by 2,044 times compared to commercial products. If the lidar sensor is the 'eye' of the machine, this AI SoC semiconductor is the brain that processes the input information and infers location and surrounding conditions. It can process massive data such as long-distance, 360-degree surround spatial information detected by the lidar sensor in real time. It reduces energy consumption by 2,044 times compared to the commercial mobile computing platform Jetson Tx2 and supports a maximum 48 FPS processing speed.

Professor Kim Jae-Joon's lab will present a patch-type 'fusion sensor' technology. By adding an analog artificial intelligence circuit to the sensor's signal processing chip, the sensor itself can perform diagnosis and detection functions. It is a sensor that can diagnose arrhythmia with biosignals and detect harmful gases. It is also drawing attention as a reconfigurable platform technology that operates the desired detection function by attaching and removing the elements that make up the sensor like stickers and combining them. This technology, named 'adhesive interposer', is the result of a convergence research conducted in collaboration with the labs of Professors Shin Heung-Joo and Jeong Hoon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST. The research was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Ministry of Science and ICT. Meanwhile, Professor Kim Jae-Joon's research team also presented wearable device technology that detects biosignals at ISSCC in 2022 and 2023.

These results will be presented at the 2024 ISSCC Annual Conference in San Francisco, USA in February next year. A total of 234 papers will be introduced in 12 fields including analog, data converters, digital architecture, RF and wireless systems, memory, information security, power management, and IMMD at this regular academic conference.