SNU College of Engineering (Dean Cha Kook-Heon) declares to have developed a next generation artificial intelligence (AI) semi-conductor in collaboration with Samsung Electronics, KAIST, and POSTECH.
 
The Neural-Processing Research Center, led by SNU College of Engineering Professor Choi Kiyoung (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), is a mass industry-university cooperation project linking 17 professors and 100 researchers from 4 institutions including SNU, KAIST, POSTECH, and UNIST. It is through this project that SNU College of Engineering has co-developed an AI semi-conducting neuromorphic chip that mimics human brain procedures.
 
The human brain contains approximately 16 billion neurons that are connected by 10 trillion of synapses. This allows the brain to process more data with just one-hundred-millionth of energy that a supercomputer needs to operate. The neuromorphic chip is the next generation semi-conductor chip that can process mass amount of data with little energy like the brain.
 
Global IT companies like Apple, Intel, and IBM are all eagerly competing in the neuromorphic chip market. In the lead is IBM, which has created a neuromorphic chip containing 260-million artificial neurons that has a processing ability equivalent to that of a honeybee.
 
With the support of Samsung Electronics, SNU College of Engineering has established the Neural-Processing Research Center for this project last December. Professor Choi Kiyoung of SNU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is world’s leading authority in the field of low-power system has taken the role of director of the research center.
 
SNU Professor Choi Kiyoung states, “this research is an unprecedented industry-university cooperation where multiple institutions have gathered for the development of next generation semi-conductor.” He adds, “our goal is to upgrade the current honeybee level brain-inspired chip to a chip with AI processing ability that resembles the human brain.”