Bongjin Kim

Prof. Bongjin Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST. Previously, he held a position as Assistant Professor at UCSB. His research focuses on secure hardware design, machine learning, and alternative computing architectures, including Ising machines and processing-in-memory systems. He leads the Kim Circuit Research Lab, which designs novel VLSI circuits for AI, robotics, and optimization problems.

Education: PhD, University of Minnesota (ECE); MS, Pohang University of Science and Technology (ECE). He has advised over 20 graduate and undergraduate students, with notable advisees including Dr. Jooyoung Bae (PhD 2025) and Dr. Yihao Wu (PhD 2025). His work has been recognized with awards such as the NSF CAREER Award (2023) and the NRF Outstanding Young Scientist Grant (2025).

Recent research includes developing a 28nm Ising machine for combinatorial optimization (A-SSCC 2024), a scalable bit-serial accelerator for PDEs (TCAS-I 2024), and a reconfigurable compute-in-memory macro (JSSC 2024). He serves on technical committees for ISSCC, A-SSCC, and ESSERC, and chairs sessions at ESSERC 2025 and A-SSCC 2025.

Lab activities include the Basic Research Lab (NRF-funded) for Ising Foundation Model development and the C2 research project on ML ASIC accelerators. His group collaborates with institutions like SLAC, IME (A*STAR), and KAIST, fabricating over 30 test chips using 28nm/65nm processes.