Introduction to the Special Issue on the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits

This issue of the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS highlights some of the best papers from the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, which was held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, June 13-15, 2012. In 2012, the Symposium held its 26th meeting on state-of-the-art topics important to VLSI circuit and system designers, as well as device and process technology experts. Industry and academia from all over the world presented papers at the Symposium highlighting important technical contributions and recent advances in VLSI circuit design. The Symposium on VLSI Circuits received 386 submissions from 22 countries of which 97 papers were selected for presentation, covering a range of topics on digital, memory, analog, wireless and wireline communication circuits. From these presentations, the committee has selected 19 outstanding papers as highlights of the 2012 Symposium for publication in this issue of the Journal. They are presented with greater detail than in the Symposium digest. These papers were subject to the standard Journal review and rigorous referee process. We enjoyed working with the authors on these papers, and we certainly hope that the technical details presented in these papers will be valuable and enjoyable to the Journal reader.