Progress update and a look ahead

The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) begins by reporting that in 2012 we have had more than 1100 new paper submissions. In comparison, during the prior four years, TCAS-I constantly received approximately 900-1000 new paper submissions on each year. While all regions increased the number of their submissions, a slightly higher increase from Region 10 (Asia/Pacific) has been noted. We are presently trending at a solid 100 new papers submitted each month and expect a new record of submissions this year. The outstanding challenge, however, is the publication backlog. An accepted paper takes about 4-5 months to be electronically pre-published in IEEExplore and about 9 months and up to 1 year from final decision to be published in print. To address that the CAS Society generously allowed us to increase our 2012 page budget from 2700 pages to 3100 pages. We are continuing our special issue on the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) as well as the special section on the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference (CICC) which complements, with more system oriented papers, the Special Issue on the conference published every year in the IEEE JOURNAL ON SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS. You will see them again in the May and the August issues respectively.