I wonder what's behind this researcher from U.Pennsylvania getting the position at POSTECH in Korea came about:
New Discovery Could Pave Way for Korean FeRAM
Thanks to a discovery by a Korean researcher, the nation may soon be able to build ferroelectric RAM, or FeRAM.
According to POSTECH on Wednesday, Dr. Shin Young-han succeeded in figuring out the operational mechanism of ferroelectrics and published the research in the science journal Nature.
In ferroelectrics, a material is given a permanent electric polarization by the application of an electric field.
FeRAM is considered "the dream semiconductor" because it has all the merits of DRAM (can store large volumes of data), SRAM (can process data at high speed) and Flash memory (holds data when the power is turned off).
"FeRAM, which is similar to DRAM in structure, uses ferroelectrics to store an electric charge," Shin said. "I discovered why it consumes much less energy than other types of electrics by analyzing the process of data being written and deleted within ferroelectrics."
POSTECH said the discovery will greatly facilitate the development of the FeRAM technology, which can store data 10 times faster than Flash memory and keep it for longer than 10 years.
english.chosun.com
Is it merely a long planned repatriation by an overseas "student?" Or could Samsung have a hand in it?
As the success and profitability of large Korean companies have increased, several have started their own educational institutions, some of which are full-fledged universities that offer degrees up to the PhD level. The most highly regarded industrial universities include Daewoo's Institute of Advanced Engineering (IAE), Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), and Pohang Institute of Science and Technology (POSTECH), owned and operated by the Pohang Steel Company. In less than a decade since POSTECH opened its doors, it has come to attract the top 2% of the nation's college students (Pettit 1989). Like other industry schools, POSTECH pays competitive salaries to its faculty, much higher than those offered at government-run schools and even more than at KAIST.
There appear to be at least three factors contributing to the trend of companies founding universities: dissatisfaction with the political climate within public Korean universities; desire to better guide training and recruitment of a skilled workforce; and the philosophy of diversifying whenever and wherever possible. An unstated goal of company-owned schools appears to be to build loyalty with top engineering students at the same time as training them, so that they will come back and work for the company. Private industry's universities are completely independent of government agencies, funded solely by the parent companies.
Availability of cleanroom facilities at Korean institutions of higher learning, programs like IDEC, and the excellent teaching programs at KAIST, SNU, POSTECH, and other fine technical universities, puts Korea on a par with the United States for educational resources to support the semiconductor industry. Electrical engineering students emerge from Korean programs with strong skills in solid state device processing, design, and layout. While industry emphasizes support for applied research at universities, this does not suggest a weakness in basic science: through KOSEF, the government primarily supports basic research.
wtec.org
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