Inaugural Editorial - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING AND SELECTED TOPICS IN CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS, VOL. 1, NO. 1, MARCH 2011

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Inaugural Editorial

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E are honored to welcome readers and authors to the inaugural issue of the IEEE JOURNAL ON EMERGING AND SELECTED TOPICS IN CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS (JETCAS for short), which is sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS-S). Historically, members of the CAS-S have been very active in embracing, fostering, and bringing to full development new research areas. In fact, CAS-S, is a truly interdisciplinary society with a broad technical scope and, at the same time, one with an emphasis on fundamental research that lays out the foundations of new disciplines, long before there are profitable commercial exploitations. Indeed, one of the core challenges for the CAS-S today is to continue embracing and fostering core research and development in new emerging technical areas, such as, to name a few, smart systems, nanotechnology, bio-inspired electronics and bio-informatics, smart power, security, environmental protection, and “green” circuits/systems. Only by doing so can the society keep up with its long-lasting tradition as a breeding ground for new ideas and new talent. Responding to this demand from CAS-S members, IEEE approved the creation of JETCAS in June 2010. The journal, which is freely accessible on-line to all CAS-S members, aims to build a platform for the broad and timely dissemination of key innovative results and findings in rapidly-growing and/or emerging topic areas within the scope of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. Such potentially interdisciplinary emerging topics will be selected as long as, first, they are clearly situated at the forefront of current scientific and technological developments and, second, they are expected to grow over time in scientific and professional importance and, therefore, in the number of active practitioners. From this point of view, JETCAS is expected to create new communities interested in the long-term development of the most promising subjects presented in the journal. The editorial strategy followed by JETCAS will be the publication of Special Issues on the selected topics. These issues will include research contributions from leading experts and presentations geared towards a wide audience of scientists and practitioners in the form of overview and tutorial-style articles and multidisciplinary research papers. JETCAS is published quarterly and solicits, with particular emphasis on emerging areas, special issues on topics that cover the entire scope of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, namely the theory, analysis, modeling, design, automation, and implementation of electronic circuits and systems, spanning theoretical foundations, applications, and architectures for signal and information processing. JETCAS will only publish papers that are submitted in response to a specific Call for Papers. These calls will be listed on JETCAS website, http://jetcas.polito.it/. All special issue proposals will be evaluated for relevance of the topic, timeliness, technical merit, impact, and general interest to the Society by a list of

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JETCAS.2011.2144490

distinguished experts and luminaries assembled in the JETCAS Senior Editorial Board. The role of the Board is to identify and recommend emerging topic areas and potential guest editors for future special issues as well as provide advice about the direction of JETCAS. There are several key differences between JETCAS and other IEEE CAS Society publications of which potential JETCAS authors should be aware. • JETCAS only accepts manuscript submissions for special issues that are currently open (see the Call for Papers page on the JETCAS webpage for a list of such issues.) Papers that do not fit in the scope of an open special issue should be submitted to one of the other IEEE CAS Society publications. • Each JETCAS special issue will be handled by a group of Guest Editors (who are typically different from the Senior Editorial Board members) assigned by the JETCAS Editor-in-Chief. • There is a fairly strict page limit for each JETCAS issue. If a particular issue attracts a very large number of submissions, authors of accepted papers may be asked to reduce the length of their manuscripts after the first round of the review process in order to accommodate all accepted papers. It is also possible to dedicate two consecutive issues of JETCAS to that topic. • An individual may not be an author or co-author of more than two submissions to any JETCAS special issue. A Guest Editor can appear as an author or co-author on no more than one submission. Submission of a contribution is taken to signify the fact that the same paper has not been submitted, accepted, published or copyrighted elsewhere. Expanded versions of a manuscript which was previously presented at some conference may be submitted to JETCAS. However, as a rule of thumb, at least 50% additional technical content (in terms of theory, algorithm, design, results) is expected to be present in the JETCAS submission with respect to the corresponding conference version. If any part of the manuscript has been presented, published or submitted elsewhere, this should be clearly noted in the submitted manuscript to JETCAS, and major differences between the present submission and the previously published or submitted papers must be explained. This first Special Issue contains six papers related to the topic “Variation-Aware Design for Nanoscale VLSI Circuits and Systems,” which are based on the works presented during the IEEE Circuits and Systems Forum on Emerging and Special Topics (CAS-FEST), in conjunction with ICECS 2010, in Athens, Greece. These papers illustrate the breadth and depth of what we are trying to focus in this journal. The JETCAS Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Massoud Pedram of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Manuel Delgado-Restituto of the Microelectronics Institute of Seville, Spain, will work together on the recruitment of senior editors, selection of special issues and guest

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editors, decision about the relevance of individual submissions to an open special issue, interactions with the guest editors of special issues, review and approval of all guest editors’ recommendations, and strategic or longer-term operational issues. Proposals for Special Issue must be sent to the JETCAS EiC or Deputy EiC. Their contact information can be found at the JETCAS web page under the “Senior Editorial Board” link. We look forward to your submissions, as well as your comments and support.

MASSOUD PEDRAM, Editor-in-Chief University of Southern California Department of EE-Systems Los Angeles, CA 90089-2562 USA [email protected]

MANUEL DELGADO-RESTITUTO, Deputy EiC Instituto de Microelectranica de Sevilla Parque Tecnolagico de La Cartuja Seville, 41092 Spain [email protected] ENRICO MACII, 2010–2011 VP Publications Politecnico di Torino Department of Control and Computer Engineering Torino, 10129 Italy [email protected] GIANLUCA SETTI, 2010 President University of Ferrara Department of Engineering Ferrara, 44100 Italy [email protected]

Massoud Pedram (S’88–M’90–SM’98–F’01) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1986, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering—Systems, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he is currently a professor and Chair of Computer Engineering. He has published 4 books and more than 400 journal and conference papers. His current research focuses on energy-efficient computing, energy storage systems, low power electronics and design, and computer aided design of VLSI circuits and systems. Dr. Pedram has served on the technical program committee of a number of conferences, including the Design Automation Conference (DAC), Design and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), Asia-Pacific Design automation Conference (ASP-DAC), and International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). He co-founded and served as the Technical Co-chair and General Co-chair of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (SLPED) in 1996 and 1997, respectively. He was the Technical Program Chair and the General Chair of the 2002 and 2003 International Symposium on Physical Design. His research has received a number of awards including two DAC Best Paper Awards, a Distinguished Paper Citation from ICCAD, two ICCD Best Paper Awards, and two IEEE Transactions Best Paper Awards. He is a recipient of the NSF’s Young Investigator Award (1994) and the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award (a.k.a. PECASE Award) (1996). He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES).

Manuel Delgado-Restituto (M’96) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees on Physics-Electronics from the University of Seville, Spain, in 1990 and 1996, respectively. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher of the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville/CNM-CSIC (IMSE-CNM/CSIC) where he heads a research group on low-power medical microelectronics. During his career, he has developed/conducted pioneering R&D activities on bio-inspired microelectronics, including vision chips and neuro-fuzzy interpolators and controllers. He has also worked in the application of chaotic dynamics to instrumentation and communications and completed the design and prototyping of the first, worldwide, chaos-based communication MoDem chip. he has also contributed in the design of structured analog and mixed-signal design, including integrated circuits for wireless and power-line communication systems and data converters, and the design for reusability of analog and mixed-signal circuit blocks. Some of the chips developed during these activities were state-of-the-art in their respective fields and entered in massive production. Currently, his research interests are in the design of silicon microsystems to understanding biological neural systems, the development of neural prostheses and brain-machine interfaces and the implementation of wireless Body Area Network transceivers. He has authored/edited 3 books; around 20 chapters in contributed


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books, including original tutorials on chaotic integrated circuits, design of data converters and chips for bioengineering; and some 150 articles in peer-review specialized publications. He has participated in several successful research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and the European Community. Dr. Delgado-Restituto has served or is serving as Associate Editor and Guest Editor for different IEEE and non-IEEE journals (including the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS). He is on the committee of different international conferences; he is member of the IEEE CAS Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS) technical committee, and has served as technical program chair of different international IEEE conferences. Enrico Macii (M’92–SM’01–F’06) received Dr.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Politecnico di Torino, the Dr.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Universita’ di Torino, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino. From May 1991 through August 1991 he was a Visiting Faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles, and from September 1991 through September 1994 he was an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Currently, he is an Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. His research interests include several aspects of the computeraided design of digital integrated circuits and systems, with particular emphasis on logic synthesis, optimization, testing, and formal verification. In the last few years, he has focused his attention to the study and development of methodologies, algorithms and tools for power estimation and optimization of systems described at various levels of the design hierarchy. He has authored over 300 scientific publications, including 40 articles in IEEE and/or ACM Transactions, 40 articles in other international journals, 5 book chapters and over 200 papers in the proceedings of IEEE/ACM conferences. In 2004, he was the Editor of the book Ultra Low-Power Electronics and Design (Kluwer). Dr. Macii is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor for the same journal (1997–2005) and an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (2000–2005). He was the Technical Program Co-Chair of the IEEE Alessandro Volta Memorial Workshop on Low Power Design (in 1999), the Technical Program Co-Chair (in 2000) and the General Chair (in 2001) of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), the General Chair (in 2003) and the Program Chair (in 2004) of the IEEE International Workshop on Power, Area and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation (PATMOS). He serves on the Technical Program Committee of several IEEE and ACM design automation conferences and workshops, including DAC, DATE, ISLPED, GLSVLSI, and PATMOS. He has received the Best Paper Award for an article presented at the 1996 IEEE EuroDAC: European Design Automation Conference. He is a Member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and a Member of the Advisory Committe of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA). Gianluca Setti (S’89–M’91–SM’02–F’06) received the Dr. Eng. degree (with honors) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering and computer science from the University of Bologna in 1992 and 1997, respectively. From May 1994 to July 1995 he was with the Laboratory of Nonlinear Systems (LANOS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as visiting researcher. Since 1997 he has been with the School of Engineering at the University of Ferrara, Italy, where he is currently a Professor of Circuit Theory and Analog Electronics. He held several visiting position as Visiting Professor/Scientist at EPFL (2002, 2005), UCSD (2004), IBM T. J. Watson Laboratories (2004, 2007) and at the University of Washington, Seattle (2008, 2010) and is also a permanent faculty member of ARCES, University of Bologna. His research interests include nonlinear circuits, recurrent neural networks, implementation and application of chaotic circuits and systems, statistical signal processing, electromagnetic compatibility, wireless communications and sensor networks. Dr. Setti received the 1998 Caianiello prize for the best Italian Ph.D. thesis on Neural Networks and he is co-recipient of the 2004 IEEE CAS Society Darlington Award, as well as of the best paper award at ECCTD2005 and the best student paper award at EMCZurich2005. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS (1999–2002 and 2002–2004) and for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS (2004–2007), the Deputy-Editor-in-Chief, for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (2004–2007) and as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS (2006–2007) and of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—I: REGULAR PAPERS (2008–2009). He was the 2004 Chair of the Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems of the of the IEEE CAS Society, a Distinguished Lecturer (2004–2005), a member of the Board of Governors (2005–2008), and is served as the 2010 President of the same society.