Editorial

Embedded microelectronic systems: status and trends

Advances in silicon technology and the resultant increasedintegration capacity are changing the way of designingintegrated circuits, where the emphasis now is to design andintegrate a complete system function on a single die, system-on-chip (SoC). This is unlike the traditional approach whichimplements a specific component function due to the limitedintegration capacity as an ASIC, which is then assembledwith other integrated circuits on a printed-circuit-board toproduce complete system function, system-on-board. Someof the main drivers of SoC are: time to market, increasedperformance, cost and size. In order to meet such drivers andto achieve the full potential of the continuing scaling downof CMOS technology, the last five years or so has seentremendous academic and industrial research efforts world-wide aimed at addressing the key challenges of SoC design.As a result, there has been significant progress in thedevelopment of hardware and software methods, algorithmsand tools that address the design, validation, and test ofmulti-million transistor chips. To highlight the achieve-ments of such research, IEE Proceedings Computers andDigital Techniques has invited 25 leading researchers towrite papers that provide state-of-the-art coverage andidentify future trends in electronic embedded systemsdesign. This Special Issue is produced in two parts. Thefirst part presents papers in three distinct research themes:embedded systems, embedded software, and network-on-chip. The second part which will appear in May 2005 haspapers that address another four main SoC research themes:architectural synthesis, low power design, simulation andvalidation, and finally manufacturing test.

I would like to sincerely thank all the authors for agreeingto contribute to the Special Issue and the reviewers forkeeping up with the very tight schedule that allowed us tocomplete this Special Issue as planned in less than a year.I also like to thank Stuart Govan (Journals Publisher, IEE)for supporting the development of this Special Issueand April Sparks, Linda Meller, Keith Martin andAnn Thompson at the IEE for their assistance in producingthis issue. It is my hope that this Special Issue will help toprovide a structured document that contains a summary ofthe recent developments of effective methods and tools thatsupport the SoC design paradigm.

BASHIR M. AL-HASHIMI

IEE Proceedings online no. 20059058

doi: 10.1049/ip-cdt:20059058

Bashir M. Al-Hashimi is Editor-in-Chief of IEE Proceedings Computers &Digital Techniques, and is with theUniversity of Southampton, UK.

IEE Proc.-Comput. Digit. Tech., Vol. 152, No. 2, March 2005 113