Kim receives 2026 SRC Rama Divakaruni Technical Excellence Award for data center memory architecture

Electrical and computer engineering professor Nam Sung Kim of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering has been selected to receive the 2026 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Rama Divakaruni Technical Excellence Award, recognizing research in and innovative contributions to the semiconductor industry. Kim was cited for “his pioneering contributions to memory and storage architecture,” laying the early foundations for architectures used in data centers.

The Rama Divakaruni Technical Excellence Award celebrates “innovative contributions that significantly advance the productivity and competitiveness of the semiconductor sector.”  As one of the microelectronics industry’s premier honors, the award celebrates university researchers whose scientific breakthroughs deliver transformative value to commercial semiconductor manufacturing — a caliber of work further demonstrated by the many awardees who hold membership in the National Academy of Engineering.

Kim is recognized as a leader in computer architecture design who made important contributions to the “memory wall” problem, in which computer performance is limited by a mismatch between processing unit speeds and memory unit speeds. His academic research directly anticipated the Compute Express Link (CXL) standard allowing processing units to quickly communicate with both hardware accelerators and memory units, enabling high-performance computing in data centers.

In 2015, Kim delivered a paper to the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computing Architectures titled “Alloy: Parallel-serial memory channel architecture for single-chip heterogeneous processor systems.” This paper is recognized by industry professionals as anticipating the development of CXL in 2019. Kim served as an earlier academic consultant for the emerging standard, and he provided valuable insights during pre-commercial hardware stages.

His research group performed the first characterization of a CXL memory system, providing data that directly challenged the standing assumptions about these systems drawn from simulations. This work was critical to the accelerated adoption of these systems in data centers, where they are now commonplace. He continues to foster academia-industry collaboration by influencing commercial data center architectures and next-generation hardware designs.

Kim is the first Illinois researcher to receive this award since electrical and computer engineering Professor Emeritus Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang in 1999 for his work in “Modeling, Simulation and Design Guidelines for VLSI Reliability.” Kang led the development of the first 32-bit microprocessor chips at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and he made seminal contributions to the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) of transistors on microchips. He was the first Electrical and Computer Engineering Department head of foreign origin. He went on to serve as dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa-Cruz, chancellor of the University of California, Merced, and president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Nam Sung Kim is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. He is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Kim holds the W.J. ‘Jerry’ Sanders III – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Endowed Chair Professor appointment.