Editorial

This issue of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems is devoted to papers that appear in The International Symposium on Physical Design 1999 (ISPD-99) held April 12??14, in Monterey, CA. The symposium provided a high-quality forum for the exchange of ideas and results in critical areas related to the physical design of VLSI systems. This annual symposium evolved from the ACM/SIGDA Physical Design Workshops held during the years 1987??1996 with the first ISPD held in 1997. Its scope included all aspects of physical design, from interactions with behavior- and logic-level synthesis, to back-end performance analysis and verification. We invited all ISPD-99 authors to submit their papers for consideration in the special issue. The submitted papers were divided between the guest editors to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Finally, a total of nine regular-length papers and two short papers were accepted into this special issue. These papers cover a wide range of current physical design topics, including partitioning, floorplanning, placement, routing, interconnect modeling, and design for manufacturability. The accepted papers meet the usual high standard of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.