South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Industrial Technology Association said on April 13 they selected Park Jong-sung (박종성), a master at SEMES, and Jung In-hwa (정인화), a principal researcher at Atlas Networks, as winners of the April 2026 Korea Engineer Award.

Park was recognized for developing micro pillar grid array (MPGA) prober equipment for inspecting high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The equipment rearranges HBM chips on a temperature-control package pedestal to enable precise inspections in high-temperature (95 to 110 degrees Celsius) and low-temperature (-10 degrees Celsius) environments. It achieves a chip rearrangement error of plus or minus 5 micrometres or less and reached more than three times the industry average output at room temperature. Park developed a total of 11 types of equipment in the semiconductor inspection and measurement equipment field over about 15 years after joining SEMES.

Jung was recognized for developing a virtual private network (VPN)-based software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution and South Korea's first wireless-based mobile test automation (MTA) platform. The SD-WAN solution cuts line costs by 56 percent and reduces recovery time after failures by 85 percent, and is being supplied to 40 locations overseas. Annual exports total $63,000. Jung has focused on research in information and communications over about nine years at Atlas Networks.

"Based on my experience developing 11 types of semiconductor and display equipment, I will do my best to contribute to enhancing national competitiveness," Park said. "I am confident wireless mobile test automation technology will lead to stronger global competitiveness for South Korea's IT industry, and I will contribute so our country can leap forward to become the world's best platform nation," Jung said.