Introduction to the Special Issue on the 2012 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference

The IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the foremost global forum for presenting advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. Every year since its first issue, the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS has highlighted some well-received papers from the most recent ISSCC in special issues. This special issue covers the ISSCC conference held in San Francisco, CA, February 19??23, 2012. Session chairs and co-chairs initially recommended papers for publication, with final decision for inclusion based on peer review. This January issue includes the topics from the low power and high performance digital, memory, technology directions as well as imagers, medical and sensors. Five innovative papers were selected from the Energy Efficient Digital sessions of the ISSCC 2012 for this special issue. Two of the papers describe ultra-low-power processors. There are also two energy efficient special function SoC papers: an object recognition processor and a 60 GHz transceiver. The last paper describes an enhancement of the razor technique.