Guest editorial: low-power electronics and design

I N THE last decade, power dissipation has become a critical design metric for an increasingly large number of VLSI circuits. The main driving factor for this trend is the exploding market of portable electronic appliances, which calls for complex integrated systems that can be powered by lightweight batteries with long periods between recharges. Additionally, system cost must be extremely low to achieve high-market penetration. Both battery lifetime and system cost are heavily impacted by power dissipation. The purpose of this special issue is that of introducing the readers with advanced techniques and methods for the design of low-power circuits and systems. The main, but not the only source of material for the issue is the 2000 edition of ISLPED, the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design. A total of 48 articles were submitted for evaluation. After a thorough process of peer review, which involved over 80 experts in the field, 12 papers were selected for publication (six as full papers and six as transactions brief papers). The issue is organized in four main sections. The first, consisting of three contributions, is concerned with low-power digital technologies and circuit-level power-optimization solutions. The second section addresses the problem of power estimation and optimization in memories and buses of processor-based systems. Power-aware operating systems, energy-efficient system design, and system-level power estimation are the subjects of the third section. Finally, low-power issues in analog and RF design are considered in the last section. We found most of the submissions to the special issue of extremely valuable quality and we thank all the contributors for their effort. Choosing only 12 articles for publication has been a very difficult and challenging task. We hope that the readers will appreciate the papers we have selected and we hope that this issue will serve as a stimulus for opening up new research investigations in the area of low-power electronics and design.