Seoyoung Jang of DGIST Wins 'Best Student Paper Award' at Europe's Leading International Semiconductor Circuit Conference

DGIST (President Lee Geon-Woo) announced on September 17 that Seoyoung Jang, an Integrated MS-PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, and Computer Science, has received the Best Student Paper Award for her paper presented at the 51st European Solid-State Device Research Conference (ESSERC 2025). The award was presented at ESSERC 2026, which took place in Mallorca, Spain, from September 7 to September 10.

ESSERC is an internationally renowned academic conference in the field of semiconductor circuits, representing Europe. Historically, award recipients have mainly come from prestigious universities and research institutes in Europe and North America, making it highly unusual for a researcher affiliated with an Asian university to receive this honor.

Seoyoung Jang, Integrated Master's and Doctoral Program Student at DGIST

The award-winning paper addresses next-generation ultrahigh-speed interface technology between chips, required in AI data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. This achievement is the result of joint international research between DGIST and IBM Research Europe-Zurich, which has continued since 2022.

Seoyoung Jang developed an ultrahigh-speed wired transmitter to quickly and efficiently transmit large-scale data in AI data centers and HPC systems. High-speed chip-to-chip interfaces present technical challenges, as increased transfer speeds lead to greater channel loss, circuit complexity, and power consumption, making it difficult to achieve both high speed and high energy efficiency simultaneously.

To address this, a digital multi-tone (DMT) method was applied by dividing a wide frequency band into 31 sub-channels and flexibly allocating data and power to each frequency band according to channel characteristics. In particular, the core digital signal processing functions required for DMT signal generation and a high-speed data converter were integrated on a single chip, making it possible to realize an ultrahigh-speed transmitter that operates in practice.

Seoyoung Jang commented, "I am very pleased to have developed and implemented a transmitter technology in an actual chip that simultaneously achieves the high transmission speed and energy efficiency required for chip-to-chip interfaces in AI data centers, and to have received international recognition for it." She added, "Going forward, I will expand my research toward next-generation high-speed interfaces and interconnect technologies (chip-to-chip connections) with speeds exceeding 200 gigabits per second (200Gb/s)."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.