"In the semiconductor academia, the growth of Chinese papers is continuing. China is actively hiring professors in research fields, and the quantitative and qualitative growth of papers is extremely fast."
Professor Hong Sung-wan of Sogang University's Department of Electronic Engineering said this at the ISSCC 2026 Seoul media briefing held at Space Share in Jung-gu, Seoul, on the 26th. At ISSCC 2026, China kept its position as the country with the most accepted papers, ranking No. 1 for the fourth consecutive year. China, which had 92 papers accepted at ISSCC 2025, had a total of 96 papers accepted at ISSCC 2026.
The 73rd ISSCC, called the "Olympics of semiconductor design," is scheduled to be held in San Francisco, the United States, from Feb. 15 to 19 (local time) next year. At ISSCC, more than 3,000 scholars and researchers active at Google, Tesla, Nvidia, AMD, and other organizations exchange research results and information and discuss the future semiconductor industry and technologies. Park Jun-seok, a senior engineer at Samsung Electronics, Kim Dong-gyun, a fellow at SK hynix, and other figures from academia and industry attended to present the latest semiconductor technology trends.
In addition to analog semiconductor tracks such as power management ICs (PMICs), where it has shown strength, China also had a total of four research papers accepted in the TD (Technical Directions) track, which explores future technologies. Lee Hyeong-min, a professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Korea University, said, "China is standing out across various areas, not only in analog and other tracks where many papers had been accepted before, but also by listing papers in new tracks such as the medical track."
Korea ranked third with a total of 46 papers accepted, following China and the United States (56 papers). Korea had a total of 11 papers accepted in the memory semiconductor track. With 13 papers from Samsung Electronics and 12 from KAIST, papers were listed evenly across corporations and academia. Samsung Electronics ranked as the corporation with the most papers accepted in the world, and among academic institutions worldwide, KAIST had the second-most accepted papers after China's Tsinghua University (18 papers).
However, unlike China, Korea again had no papers accepted in the TD track, as was the case last year, prompting calls for more research in future technology fields. Kwon Kyung-ha, a professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST, said, "Korea's industrial structure itself runs centered on memory semiconductors," and added, "There are many limits on investment in emerging application fields. Looking at the government-led research projects, there is no funding for research that looks five or 10 years ahead, and this is having a major impact."
Unlike China, where academia leads research, and the United States, where industry takes the lead, an assessment emerged that it is encouraging that Korea's papers are being accepted evenly. Park said, "In China, most papers come from academia, and in the United States, industry players such as AMD have a strong leading tendency," and added, "But in our case, not only startups such as Mobilint and FuriosaAI, but also various academic institutions have an even distribution of accepted papers, which is positive."
Meanwhile, at ISSCC 2026, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix plan to unveil next-generation semiconductor solutions. Samsung Electronics will present sixth-generation high bandwidth memory (HBM4), and SK hynix will present next-generation low-power DRAM (LPDDR) and graphics DRAM (GDDR) solutions.