Undergraduate students from the Department of Electronic Engineering, College of Creative Engineering, achieved the remarkable feat of winning the Silver Award at the 2025 Creative Circuit Design Challenge.

On 6 November, the Ternary X team, comprising Kim Do Yoon (21), Song Da Ye (23), and Jeong Seo Hyun (23) from the Intelligent Semiconductor Convergence Electronics major within the Department of Electronic Engineering, won the Silver Prize in the Digital Design category of the 「2025 Creative Circuit Design Challenge」 hosted by the Semiconductor Design Education Centre (IDEC) at Kyungpook National University. The Ternary X team, comprising Kim Do Yoon (21), Song Da Ye (23), and Jeong Seo Hyeon (23) from the Intelligent Semiconductor Convergence Electronics major in the Department of Electronic Engineering, College of Creative Engineering, won the Silver Prize for implementing a “CNN Processor via Ternary Quantisation”.

The Ternary X team designed a ternary-based MNIST CNN accelerator, demonstrating handwritten character recognition on lightweight hardware. This achievement demonstrates that significant AI acceleration can be attained solely through hardware optimisation based on low power and low resource consumption within edge AI environments. The team plans to pursue minimising latency and enhancing TOPS/W by combining sparsification, pruning, and lightweight normalisation substitutions. Furthermore, they intend to expand their research field into hardware acceleration tasks for lightweight transformer models based on Large Language Models (LLMs).