[Edaily Reporter KIM AH-REUM ] Korean companies have achieved success by competing with global automotive and ICT firms such as Ford, General Motors (GM), Stellantis, Lenovo, and Meta.

KCC GLASS Corporation(344820)KCC Glass announced on the 20th that its “glass-integrated antenna” technology for vehicles—developed jointly with a team led by Professor Hong Won-bin of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology)—has received international recognition for its technological competitiveness by winning the Best Paper Award at the prestigious IEEE AP-S/URSI International Conference Industry-Academia Paper Competition. This marks the first time a Korean company has won the Best Paper Award in this competition.

The award-winning paper, titled “Surface Wave Interference Control Technology for Automotive V2X Glass-Integrated Antennas,” details the research findings on automotive glass-integrated antennas. In the paper, the research team presented a technology that resolves the issue of surface wave interference—a key challenge in automotive glass-integrated antennas—for which demand is rapidly increasing due to the spread of autonomous driving and connected cars.

With the recent expansion of V2X communications—which connect vehicles to surrounding objects—glass-integrated antennas for vehicles, which have fewer limitations in terms of communication capacity and design, have been gaining attention. However, surface wave interference caused by large glass surfaces and the vehicle’s metal components has been identified as a major factor degrading communication performance. To address this issue, the research team proposed a new design that utilizes the specific current distribution characteristics of a circular patch antenna to cancel out surface waves at the point of generation. The design is characterized by a simple structure consisting of a single metal layer, without complex multilayer structures, metal patterns, or vias.

The greatest advantage of applying this technology is that it enables both high transparency and miniaturization of the antenna. Unlike existing external “shark fin antennas,” in-vehicle embedded antennas, or film-type antennas attached to opaque areas of the glass, this design can be applied unrestrictedly across the entire front windshield, significantly increasing design flexibility and space utilization.

Based on these characteristics, KCC GLASS Corporation anticipates that it will be able to expand the scope of application beyond integrated antennas for automotive glass to include integrated antennas for architectural glass. Furthermore, the company expects that combining this technology with its semiconductor glass substrate technology—currently under development—will broaden its scope of application to include advanced defense sectors such as high-power radar systems.

A KCC GLASS Corporation official stated, “This award is a valuable achievement resulting from the combination of KCC GLASS Corporation’s material and process technologies with academic research capabilities in the field of integrated vehicle glass antennas, which is gaining attention as a core technology for future mobility,” adding, “We plan to continue developing next-generation glass-based antenna technologies that encompass not only the global automotive market but also the architectural and defense sectors.”