Professor Kentaro Kaneko’s laboratory has won the second prize at the SEMICON Japan Academia Award 2024

On December 11, 2024, the final review for the Academia Award 2024 was conducted at the SEMICON Japan, one of the largest exhibitions and conferences for the semiconductor industry in Japan, held at Tokyo Big Sight. Since the final review was based on presentations by students and the presiding faculty member in the laboratory, Professor Kentaro Kaneko (RARA Fellow) and second-year master’s degree students in the laboratory, Mr. Taisei Hattori and Mr. Tomoki Otsuka (both from the Major in Advanced Electrical, Electronic and Computer Systems, Graduate School of Science and Engineering) gave a presentation on “Development of various devices using oxide semiconductors” and won the second prize. The award ceremony was held at the SEMICON Japan 2024 GALA in a luxurious atmosphere with many notable people from various fields in the semiconductor industry in attendance.

The Academia Award is an award that recognizes outstanding research related to semiconductors, and is open to university and technical college laboratories exhibiting at the SEMICON Japan. This year, the third competition was held and a record number of 36 out of the 80 laboratories participating entered the contest. Among the participants, the eight laboratories that had advanced to the second round of judging gave presentations on a stage at the SEMICON Japan, and were evaluated on the following five criteria: “innovation and inventiveness,” “marketability,” “ability to build technical partner networks,” “expressiveness and presentation,” and “ability to foster the next generation and teamwork.” Only the top three winning laboratories will be able to participate in the award ceremony at the SEMICON Japan 2024 GALA. Mr. Taisei Hattori and Mr. Tomoki Otsuka, who gave the presentation with Prof. Kaneko, had just returned to Japan after giving a presentation at the MRS Fall Meeting, the world’s largest international conference on materials science, held in Boston, USA, evidently demonstrating the active research activities of the Kaneko Laboratory both in Japan and overseas. Incidentally, at the Kaneko Laboratory booth on the day, Mr. Kosuke Kimura and Mr. Kento Fujita (both 4th-year students in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, College of Science and Engineering) were enthusiastically explaining the research content to visitors.

〇 Comments from Prof. Kaneko on winning the award
I am truly honored to receive this very prestigious award for our laboratory. We are absolutely delighted that our educational and research activities have been highly evaluated by the SEMICON Japan, and that we have become the first winners from Ritsumeikan University. Also, we are relieved to have won the award in a very tense evaluation process, in which only the top three laboratories that had advanced to the second round were able to attend the GALA award ceremony. All the presentations given by the university laboratories on the day were of a very high standard, and any of us could have won, so I think this is entirely owing to the hard work of the laboratory members day in day out. On the day of the presentation, many of the companies that support our laboratory came to cheer us on, and we received a great deal of support. I was able to realize afresh that our laboratory is being supported by many people. I am extremely grateful to all of you.

*Photo
From right to left: Mr. Taisei Hattori, Mr. Tomoki Otsuka, Professor Kentaro Kaneko, Mr. Kosuke Kimura, and Mr. Kento Fujita (at the Palace Hotel Tokyo where the award ceremony was held)

For more information, please visit the website below.
SEMICON Japan: https://www.semiconjapan.org/en