Guest Editors' Words

Abstract

Electronic Design Automation has been the driving force of VLSI design since those circuits are far more complex beyond what a human designer can comprehend. Today, the most advanced circuits have billions of components, mostly transistors, arranged in random logic, memory, data path, analog, mixed signal, IPs, etc. The process of automation of a large VLSI chip is extremely complex, generally decomposed into several categories and steps that are part of most existing commercial tool flows. Furthermore, timing and power optimization enable a wide range of applications we see today such as computing, mobile, internet of things (IoT), etc., and can only happen with creative innovations in EDA. For its complexity, any researcher in the field must invest heavily in finding and reading appropriate literature. In this special edition, the Journal of Integrated Circuits and Systems is collecting and surveying the key topics, algorithms and approaches that pertain to the current state-of-the-art in EDA research.