At the 2015 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), which will be held at San Francisco from February 22 to 26, 2015, KAIST will present 13 papers – the most papers out of all the participating institutes and companies. Samsung Electronics comes second with nine papers, while Intel and Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) are tied for 3rd place with eight papers each. A total of 610 papers were submitted to the ISSCC 2015, but only 206 papers were accepted after evaluation.

KAIST President Sung Mo Kang said, “KAIST’s competitiveness comes from its semiconductor and design-based education. We started our semiconductor education in the 1970s and established the Integrated Circuit (IC) Design Education Center (IDEC) in 1995 to aid chip manufacturing and provide workspace for experiments. IDEC has greatly raised our global status in the field of semiconductors.”

Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo from the KAIST Department of Electrical Engineering, who was selected as the first Program Chair of the International Technical Program Committee from an Asian university, said, “In order for Korea to become an all-rounded powerhouse in the field of memory chips and non-memory, both the academia and the industry have to work together with the same objective.” He added, “Academia must provide the industry with more challenging technology to give make it more competitive and set milestones as well as paradigms along the way.”

ISSCC is one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of semiconductors worldwide. It is held annually in February, and only around 200 papers are accepted out of all the papers submitted by semiconductor-related companies, institutes and universities. Also known as the “Semiconductor Olympics”, the conference is attended by around 3000 people worldwide to discuss semiconductor technology. In previous conferences, Intel and Samsung Electronics have announced their new processors and memory technology.