UNIST Professor Lee Gyuho's Team Wins Prime Minister's Award at the 25th Semiconductor Design Contest

System-on-Chip Semiconductor Design for Spatial Information Processing

Professor Lee Gyu-ho of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at UNIST (President Park Jong-rae) led the Intelligent Systems Research Lab team (graduate students Jeong Joo-eun, Kim Seung-bin, Jang Woo-young, Seo Bo-kyung, and Lee Sang-ho), which received the Prime Minister's Award at the 25th Korea Semiconductor Design Competition.

Professor Lee Gyu-ho, UNIST.

The Semiconductor Design Competition is jointly organized by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, aiming to cultivate semiconductor design skills and discover creative ideas among university (graduate) students. In this competition, a total of 20 awards were given, including 1 Presidential Award, 1 Prime Minister's Award, and 4 Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Awards.

Research team (from left) Seobo Kyung, Jang Woo Young, Jung Joo Eun, Kim Seung Bin, Lee Sang Ho, graduate students.

Professor Lee’s team was honored with the second-place Prime Minister's Award for their ultra-low power semiconductor design that processes spatial information. The Presidential Award went to the Korea University team, while the Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Awards were awarded to teams from KAIST, POSTECH, Seoul National University, and DGIST, respectively.

The semiconductor submitted by the research team is a system-on-chip semiconductor equipped with spatial information processing functions for measurement data from LiDAR sensor semiconductors. If the LiDAR sensor semiconductor is the eyes of a machine, this semiconductor acts as the brain that efficiently processes the vast spatial data input from the LiDAR sensor semiconductor.

Compared to the commercial mobile computing platform Jetson Tx2, which is actually used in mobile robots, energy consumption was reduced by 99.89%, and a real-time computation speed up to 54.3 times faster was achieved, receiving high evaluations not only for design creativity but also for technical excellence, commercial viability, and completeness.

The awards ceremony was held on October 24 at COEX in Seoul.