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KAIST, NTU, and Technion Collaborate for Research in Emerging Fields
KAIST, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore, and Technion of Israel signed an agreement on April 11, 2016 in Seoul to create a five-year joint research program for some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial areas: robotics, medical technologies, satellites, materials science and engineering, and entrepreneurship. Under the agreement, the universities will also offer dual degree opportunities, exchange visits, and internships.
In the picture from the left, Bertil Andersson of NTU, Sung-Mo Kang of KAIST, and Peretz Lavie of Technion hold the signed memorandum of understanding.
2016.04.14 View 18686 -
Professors Jeon and Choi Receive the Young Scientist Award
Professors Seokwoo Jeon of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Jang Wook Choi of the Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability (EEWS) at KAIST received the Young Scientist Award.
The award ceremony took place at the Korea Press Center in Seoul. Presented by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning of Korea and the National Academy of Engineering of Korea, the Young Scientist Award is given to outstanding scientists under the age of 40 who have demonstrated excellence in their research in the field of natural science.
Each year the award is given to three scientists in different areas.
Professor Jeon was recognized for his achievement in creating a new property of materials. He studied synthesis and development of low-dimensional nanomaterials and developed a large area nanostructure.
Professor Choi’s research area was to discover optimal materials for rechargeable batteries. By applying his research, he developed rechargeable batteries with high efficiency, making the wearable system more feasible.
2016.01.11 View 19030 -
KAIST and Hanwha Chemical Agree on Research Collaboration
KAIST signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Hanwha Chemical Co., Ltd., a Korean chemical and auto manufacturer, on November 2, 2015 to establish a research center on campus.
The research center, which will be named “KAIST-Hanwha Chemical Future Technology Research Center,” will implement joint research projects for five years beginning from 2016 to develop innovative, green technologies that will help the Korean chemical industry boost its global competitiveness and to nurture top researchers and engineers in chemical engineering.
The research center will lead the development of next-generation petrochemical materials and manufacturing technology and the establishment of pure high-refining processes which are more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. KAIST and Hanwha will strive to secure new technologies that have the greatest commercialization potential in the global market. They will also establish a scholarship fund for 15 KAIST doctoral students in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Many professors from the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department including Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee, who was listed in the Top 20 Translational Researchers of 2014 by Nature Biotechnology this year, and Professor Hyunjoo Lee who received the Woman Scholar award at the 2015 World Chemistry Conference, will work at the research center.
Professor Lee, the head of the research center, said, “Collaborating with Hanwha will give us a strong basis for our efforts to carry out original research and train the best researchers in the field.”
Chang-Bum Kim, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hanwha Chemical, said,
“We hope our collaborations with KAIST will go beyond the typical industry and university cooperation. The two organizations will indeed jointly operate the research center, and this will become a new model for industry and university cooperation. We expect that the research center will play a crucial role in the development of new products and technologies to grow the Korean chemical industry.”
In the photo, President Steve Kang of KAIST (fourth from left) and CEO Chang-Bum Kim of Hanwha Chemical (fifth from left) hold the MOU together.
2015.11.01 View 17731 -
KAIST Develops Fiber-Like Light-Emitting Diodes for Wearable Displays
Professor Kyung-Cheol Choi and his research team from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST have developed fiber-like light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which can be applied in wearable displays. The research findings were published online in the July 14th issue of Advanced Electronic Materials.
Traditional wearable displays were manufactured on a hard substrate, which was later attached to the surface of clothes. This technique had limited applications for wearable displays because they were inflexible and ignored the characteristics of fabric.
To solve this problem, the research team discarded the notion of creating light-emitting diode displays on a plane. Instead, they focused on fibers, a component of fabrics, and developed a fiber-like LED that shared the characteristics of both fabrics and displays.
The essence of this technology, the dip-coating process, is to immerse and extract a three dimensional (3-D) rod (a polyethylene terephthalate fiber) from a solution, which functions like thread. Then, the regular levels of organic materials are formed as layers on the thread.
The dip-coating process allows the layers of organic materials to be easily created on the fibers with a 3-D cylindrical structure, which had been difficult in existing processes such as heat-coating process. By controlling of the withdrawal rate of the fiber, the coating's thickness can also be adjusted to the hundreds of thousandths of a nanometer.
The researchers said that this technology would accelerate the commercialization of fiber-based wearable displays because it offers low-cost mass production using roll-to-roll processing, a technology applied to create electronic devices on a roll of flexible plastics or metal foils.
Professor Choi said, “Our research will become a core technology in developing light emitting diodes on fibers, which are fundamental elements of fabrics. We hope we can lower the barrier of wearable displays entering the market.”
The lead author of the published paper, Seon-Il Kwon, added, “This technology will eventually allow the production of wearable displays to be as easy as making clothes.”
Picture 1: The Next Generation Wearable Display Using Fiber-Based Light-Emitting Diodes
Picture 2: Dip-Coating Process to Create Fiber-Based Light-Emitting Diodes
Picture 3: Fiber-Based Light-Emitting Diodes
2015.08.11 View 15711 -
Dong-Young Lee, a Doctoral Candidate, Receives the Best Paper Award
Dong-Young Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Mechanical Engineering Department, KAIST, received the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Composite Structures (ICCS). The event was held in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 15-18, 2015. Mr. Lee’s adviser is Professor Dai-Gil Lee of the same department.
The ICCS is held every other year, and is one of the largest and long-established conferences on composite materials and structures in the world. At this year’s conference, a total of 680 papers were presented, among which, two papers were chosen for the Best Paper Award, including Mr. Lee’s.
The paper, entitled “Gasket-integrated Carbon and Silicon Elastomer Composite Bipolar Plate for High-temperature PEMFC,” will be published in the September issue of Composite Structures which is one of the top journals in mechanical engineering as judged by the Google Scholar Metrics rankings.
Mr. Lee dropped the conventional method of PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells) assembly and instead developed a gasket-integrated carbon and silicone elastomer composite bipolar plate. This technology significantly increased the energy efficiency of fuel cells and their productivity.
Mr. Lee said, “I would like to thank the many people who supported me, especially my Ph.D. adviser, Professor Dai-Gil Lee. Without their encouragement, I would have not won this award. I hope my research will contribute to solving energy problems in the future.”
In addition, Professor Joon-Woo Im from Chonbuk National University, Senior Researcher Il-Bum Choi from the Agency for Defense Development, and a fellow doctoral candidate Soo-Hyun Nam from KAIST participated in this research project.
2015.07.09 View 15569 -
KAIST Develops Ultrathin Polymer Insulators Key to Low-Power Soft Electronics
Using an initiated chemical vapor deposition technique, the research team created an ultrathin polymeric insulating layer essential in realizing transistors with flexibility and low power consumption. This advance is expected to accelerate the commercialization of wearable and soft electronics.
A group of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) developed a high-performance ultrathin polymeric insulator for field-effect transistors (FETs). The researchers used vaporized monomers to form polymeric films grown conformally on various surfaces including plastics to produce a versatile insulator that meets a wide range of requirements for next-generation electronic devices. Their research results were published online in Nature Materials on March 9th, 2015.
FETs are an essential component for any modern electronic device used in our daily life from cell phones and computers, to flat-panel displays. Along with three electrodes (gate, source, and drain), FETs consist of an insulating layer and a semiconductor channel layer. The insulator in FETs plays an important role in controlling the conductance of the semiconductor channel and thus current flow within the translators. For reliable and low-power operation of FETs, electrically robust, ultrathin insulators are essential. Conventionally, such insulators are made of inorganic materials (e.g., oxides and nitrides) built on a hard surface such as silicon or glass due to their excellent insulating performance and reliability.
However, these insulators were difficult to implement into soft electronics due to their rigidity and high process temperature. In recent years, many researchers have studied polymers as promising insulating materials that are compatible with soft unconventional substrates and emerging semiconductor materials. The traditional technique employed in developing a polymer insulator, however, had the limitations of low surface coverage at ultra-low thickness, hindering FETs adopting polymeric insulators from operating at low voltage.
A KAIST research team led by Professor Sung Gap Im of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department and Professor Seunghyup Yoo and Professor Byung Jin Cho of the Electrical Engineering Department developed an insulating layer of organic polymers, “pV3D3,” that can be greatly scaled down, without losing its ideal insulating properties, to a thickness of less than 10 nanometers (nm) using the all-dry vapor-phase technique called the “initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD).”
The iCVD process allows gaseous monomers and initiators to react with each other in a low vacuum condition, and as a result, conformal polymeric films with excellent insulating properties are deposited on a substrate. Unlike the traditional technique, the surface-growing character of iCVD can overcome the problems associated with surface tension and produce highly uniform and pure ultrathin polymeric films over a large area with virtually no surface or substrate limitations. Furthermore, most iCVD polymers are created at room temperature, which lessens the strain exerted upon and damage done to the substrates.
With the pV3D3 insulator, the research team built low-power, high-performance FETs based on various semiconductor materials such as organics, graphene, and oxides, demonstrating the pV3D3 insulator’s wide range of material compatibility. They also manufactured a stick-on, removable electronic component using conventional packaging tape as a substrate. In collaboration with Professor Yong-Young Noh from Dongguk University in Korea, the team successfully developed a transistor array on a large-scale flexible substrate with the pV3D3 insulator.
Professor Im said, “The down-scalability and wide range of compatibility observed with iCVD-grown pV3D3 are unprecedented for polymeric insulators. Our iCVD pV3D3 polymeric films showed an insulating performance comparable to that of inorganic insulating layers, even when their thickness were scaled down to sub-10 nm. We expect our development will greatly benefit flexible or soft electronics, which will play a key role in the success of emerging electronic devices such as wearable computers.”
The title of the research paper is “Synthesis of ultrathin polymer insulating layers by initiated chemical vapor deposition for low-power soft electronics” (Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number is 10.1038/nmat4237).
Picture 1: A schematic image to show how the initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD) technique produces pV3D3 polymeric films: (i) introduction of vaporized monomers and initiators, (ii) activation of initiators to thermally dissociate into radicals, (iii) adsorption of monomers and initiator radicals onto a substrate, and (iv) transformation of free-radical polymerization into pV3D3 thin films.
Picture 2: This is a transistor array fabricated on a large scale, highly flexible substrate with pV3D3 polymeric films.
Picture 3: This photograph shows an electronic component fabricated on a conventional packaging tape, which is attachable or detachable, with pV3D3 polymeric films embedded.
2015.03.10 View 17031 -
Professor Mikyoung Lim Receives the MediaV Young Researcher Award
Professor Mikyoung Lim of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at KAIST received the MediaV Young Researchers Award at the International Conference on Inverse Problems and Related Topics that took place at the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, on December 15-19, 2014.
The Conference established the MediaV Young Researcher Award in 2010 to recognize distinguished scholars who are age 40 or younger and have made important contributions to the field of inverse problems. This year, two recipients were chosen for the award.
Professor Lim has focused her research on the incremental reading of incomprehensible materials’ imaging and the effect of invisibility cloaking.
The other awardee was Kui Ren, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
2014.12.27 View 16446 -
Broadband and Ultrathin Polarization Manipulators Developed
Professor Bumki Min from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KAIST has developed a technology that can manipulate a polarized light in broadband operation with the use of a metamaterial.
It is expected that this technology will lead to the development of broadband optical devices that can be applied to broadband communication and display.
When an object or its structure is analyzed by using a polarized light such as a laser, the results are generally affected by the polarized state of the light. Therefore, in an optics laboratory, the light is polarized by various methods.
In such cases, researchers employ wave plates or photoactive materials. However, the performance of these devices depend vastly on wavelength, and so they are not suitable to be used as a polarizer, especially in broadband.
There were many attempts to make artificial materials that are very photoactive by using metamaterials which have a strong resonance. Nonetheless, because the materials had an unavoidable dispersion in the resonance frequency, they were not adequate for broadband operation.
Professor Min’s research team arranged and connected helical metamaterials that are smaller than the wavelength of light. They verified theoretically and experimentally that polarized light can be constantly rotated regardless of the wavelength by super-thin materials that have thickness less than one-tenth of the wavelength of the light. The experiment which confirmed the theory was conducted in the microwave band.
Broadband polarized rotational 3D metamaterials were found to rotate the polarized microwave within the range of 0.1 GHz to 40 GHz by 45 degrees regardless of its frequency. This nondispersive property is quite unnatural because it is difficult to find a material that does not change in a wide band.
In addition, the research team materialized the broadband nondispersive polarized rotational property by designing the metamaterial in a way that it has chirality, which determines the number of rotations proportional to the wavelength.
Professor Min said, “As the technology is able to manipulate ultrathin polarization of light in broadband, it will lead to the creation of ultra-shallow broadband optical devices.”
Sponsored by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea, this research was led by a PhD candidate, Hyun-Sung Park, under the guidance of Professor Min. The research findings were published online in the November 17th issue of Nature Communications.
Figure 1 – Broadband and Ultrathin Polarization Manipulators Produced by 3D Printer
Figure 2 – Concept of Broadband and Ultrathin Polarization Manipulators
2014.12.03 View 16124 -
Breakthrough in Flexible Electronics Enabled by Inorganic-based Laser Lift-off
Flexible electronics have been touted as the next generation in electronics in various areas, ranging from consumer electronics to bio-integrated medical devices. In spite of their merits, insufficient performance of organic materials arising from inherent material properties and processing limitations in scalability have posed big challenges to developing all-in-one flexible electronics systems in which display, processor, memory, and energy devices are integrated. The high temperature processes, essential for high performance electronic devices, have severely restricted the development of flexible electronics because of the fundamental thermal instabilities of polymer materials.
A research team headed by Professor Keon Jae Lee of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST provides an easier methodology to realize high performance flexible electronics by using the Inorganic-based Laser Lift-off (ILLO).
The ILLO process involves depositing a laser-reactive exfoliation layer on rigid substrates, and then fabricating ultrathin inorganic electronic devices, e.g., high density crossbar memristive memory on top of the exfoliation layer. By laser irradiation through the back of the substrate, only the ultrathin inorganic device layers are exfoliated from the substrate as a result of the reaction between laser and exfoliation layer, and then subsequently transferred onto any kind of receiver substrate such as plastic, paper, and even fabric.
This ILLO process can enable not only nanoscale processes for high density flexible devices but also the high temperature process that was previously difficult to achieve on plastic substrates. The transferred device successfully demonstrates fully-functional random access memory operation on flexible substrates even under severe bending.
Professor Lee said, “By selecting an optimized set of inorganic exfoliation layer and substrate, a nanoscale process at a high temperature of over 1000 °C can be utilized for high performance flexible electronics. The ILLO process can be applied to diverse flexible electronics, such as driving circuits for displays and inorganic-based energy devices such as battery, solar cell, and self-powered devices that require high temperature processes.”
The team’s results were published in the November issue of Wiley’s journal, ‘ Advanced Materials, ’ as a cover article entitled “ Flexible Crossbar-Structured Resistive Memory Arrays on Plastic Substrates via Inorganic-Based Laser Lift-Off.”
( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201402472/abstract )
This schematic picture shows the flexible crossbar memory developed via the ILLO process.
This photo shows the flexible RRAM device on a plastic substrate.
2014.11.26 View 12639 -
Professor Joong-Keun Park Receives SeAH Heam Academic Award
Professor Joong-Keun Park of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST received an award from SeAH Steel Corp. in recognition of his academic achievements in the field of metallic and materials engineering.
The award was presented at the 2014 Fall Conference of the Korean Institute of Metals and Materials which took place on October 22-24 at the Kangwon Land Convention Hotel.
The award, called “SeAH Heam Academic Award,” is given annually to a scholar who has contributed to the development of new metal and polymer composite materials and its related field in Korea. Following the award ceremony, Professor Park gave a keynote speech on ferrous metals for automotive materials.
2014.11.04 View 10840 -
Thomson Reuters Nominates Distinguished Professor Ryong Ryoo for Its 2014 Nobel Citation Laureates in Chemistry
The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters announced on September 25th its “2014 Citation Laureates,” a list of candidates considered likely to win the Nobel Prize in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economics. The annual Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates will be recognized in perpetuity as contenders for a Nobel Prize.
Distinguished Professor Ryong Ryoo of the Department of Chemistry, KAIST, has been nominated for the 2014 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates in Chemistry. He is the first Korean scientist who has made the list. In addition to Professor Ryoo, seven other scientists were selected as possible contenders for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, or in the future.
Professor Ryoo was named alongside Charles T. Kresge, Chief Technology Officer of Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, and Galen D. Stucky, Professor of the Department Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for their research on the design of functional mesoporous materials (http://sciencewatch.com/nobel/2014-predictions/chemistry-laureates). Mesoporous materials have high surface areas with narrow pore-sized distribution and tunable pores diameters, offering promising properties and applications in various areas including adsorption, separation, sensing, and catalysis.
Professor Ryoo has focused his research interest in the synthesis of new functional nanoporous materials such as hierarchical zeolites, mesoporous silicas, carbons, and organic-inorganic composite materials that can be used for advanced applications in the production of alternative energy sources and in green chemical processes.
According to the press release by the Thomson Reuters, the list of the 2014 Nobel predictions includes 27 researchers representing 27 distinct academic and research organizations across nine different countries.
The annual Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates study is based on the analysis of proprietary data from the research and citation database, identifying the most influential researchers in the categories of chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine, and economics. Since its inception in 2002, the study has accurately forecasted 35 Nobel Prize winners. For the full text of the press release, please go to: http://thomsonreuters.com/press-releases/092014/2014-nobel-laureates-predictions.
2014.09.29 View 14871 -
Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee Gives Special Lecture at Tianjin University, China
Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST gave a special lecture at Tianjin University, China, on September 12, 2014.
The university has invited prestigious scholars and scientists including Nobel Prize laureates from all around the world to their program called the "BeiYang Lecture Series."
Professor Lee said:
"The lecture series has invited many eminent global leaders such as Dr. Steven Chu, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 and also served the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. It is a great honor to participate in the program as a speaker. The university told me that in recognition of my research in the development of sustainable biochemical industry through systems metabolic engineering, I was invited to speak.”
Professor Lee presented his speech entitled “Production of Chemical Materials through Microorganism Metabolic Systems Engineering” and took questions from the audience.
Professor Lee developed the world’s most efficient microorganism and bioprocess such as succinate, butanol, and engineering plastic raw materials. In recent years, he has succeeded in producing a small quantity of gasoline through converting in-vivo generated fatty acids.
2014.09.16 View 13326