Guest Editors´ Introduction: Cool Chips

Low-power and high-speed chips (Cool Chips) aim to reduce power consumption and enhance performance for applications ranging from multimedia to robotics. Industry is working to develop optimal solutions—both hardware and software—for power optimization according to the processor´s required performance. The Cool Chips conference series focuses on all aspects of cool technologies. This special issue of IEEE Micro captures five contributions from among 12 submissions—not only from Cool Chips 2009 presentations but also from ordinal submissions. Multicore, video codec, and recognition processors were major topics at Cool Chips XII, and the articles selected for this issue reflect this trend.