Professor Sanghyeon Kim’s research team from our undergraduate School of Electrical Engineering has received the IEEE Paul Rappaport Award on December 8, 2025, in recognition of their achievements in developing Complementary Field-Effect Transistor (CFET) technology, which is gaining attention as a next-generation transistor architecture.
The IEEE Paul Rappaport Award is presented to the best paper selected from among the papers published over the previous year in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (TED), a leading journal in the field of semiconductor devices. This year’s award was chosen from a total of 1,202 papers published in 2024, and this achievement marks the first time that a university in Korea has received this award.
The awarded paper, titled “Heterogeneous 3-D Sequential CFETs With Ge (110) Nanosheet p-FETs on Si (100) Bulk n-FETs,” was led by Dr. Seong Kwang Kim (Ph.D. graduate in 2023 from the School of Electrical Engineering), and was conducted in collaboration with Professor Byung-Jin Cho’s laboratory. The study is significant in that it demonstrated a direction for overcoming the structural issue of CFETs—namely, the low performance of p-FETs—by integrating, as the upper device, a Ge channel with a (110) crystal orientation.
In addition, all stages of device design, fabrication, and evaluation were carried out entirely at KAIST, which represents the high research standards and infrastructure of the School of Electrical Engineering.
Dr. Seong Kwang Kim stated, “Since my Ph.D., and continuing now as I work in industry, I have been continually developing three-dimensional stacked devices. There remain many challenges to overcome in order to achieve mass production of three-dimensional stacked devices, and I will continue researching and taking on these challenges to contribute to the development of semiconductor technology in Korea.”
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