Harsh Chips, but a Grateful Good-Bye

......After two terms and a four-year stint, this issue is my last as editor in chief of IEEE Micro, and I am happy to go out with something old and something new. The “old” is an IEEE Micro tradition—a special section highlighting updated and augmented versions of top papers from the Cool Chips conference. Fumio Arakawa and Makoto Ikeda have again done a fine job of recruiting, selecting, and editing articles for this Cool Chips section. “Old” also includes a selection of our most interesting generalinterest submissions received in recent months that are not tied to a particular theme. The “new” is the first IEEE Micro serialization of which I am aware, on “harsh chips”—the design of chips that must operate in harsh environments, from space to high radiation to high temperature and beyond. I was uncertain how many submissions this harsh chips topic would attract, but guest editors Augusto Vega, Alper Buyuktosunoglu, and Pradip Bose have done an outstanding job in recruiting a large set of interesting submissions and selecting the best among them. We will run these selections over several issues, but the first two harsh chips articles appear here: the cover article, “Timing Verification of Fault-Tolerant Chips for Safety-Critical Applications in Harsh Environments” by Slijepcevic et al., and “R3TOS-Based Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Systems” by Iturbe et al. I hope that you enjoy and learn from these first two harsh chips selections, as I did. As noted at the outset, this issue is my last as editor in chief of IEEE Micro. I am grateful to have had a strong team all around, from the editorial board, guest editors, authors, and reviewers to IEEE and production staff, all of whom have been essential and tireless in producing issues highlighting key contributions and breakthroughs. Issues have covered top picks, hot chips, and cool chips; big chips and dark chips; harsh chips, reliable chips, and energy-aware chips that are sometimes reconfigurable, sometimes graphical, and which are embedded in devices and deployed in datacenters, with high-speed interconnects, and dealing with big data, using techniques to parallelize sequential code. With an occasional bit of prodding and cajoling, including to me, we have produced 24 issues of timely content, and almost always in a timely way. I hope that you have seen new ideas and learned things you could apply in your research or in your practice. I have a superb successor in Professor Lieven Eeckhout, who I am confident will take IEEE Micro to new heights. Lieven has served as associate editor in chief for the past three years, and his innovative approach has already resulted in the thoughtful award summaries of major computer architecture prizes published in IEEE Micro over that time, as well as key guidance on editorial content and other matters. As I have noted previously in this space, with Lieven’s inaugural January/February 2015 issue, IEEE Micro will convert to a predominantly digital format (with print still available at a price premium for those who strongly desire a paper version). Lieven has been thinking long and carefully about how to use the digital format to provide additional value. As with his other efforts, I look forward to seeing Lieven’s creative approaches to digital in the coming years. With that, I bid adieu. As always, happy reading.