Guest editorial: Special issue on Communication IC

By definition, Communication ICs are integrated circuits specially designed for and used in communication systems. From hardware designer???s point of view, a communication system could be a system with DSP (Digital Signal Processor, including digital ASIC, Application Specific Integrated Circuit and FPGA) + MCU (Micro Controller Unit) surrounded with analog/digital interfaces, including ADC (Analog to Digital Converter), DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) and RFIC (Radio Frequency IC) modules. ICs are core components for communications. IC based on VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) has been the essential technology supporting telecommunications and it is growing rapidly in the last 20 years. It will definitely keep their high growing pace in the next decade. The involved R&D covers mobile communications, highway (core network) and last-mile (access network) broadband communication, and other domain specific communications. Radio communication steps into its new generation in every 10 years, the bandwidth has been 1Gbps and will be 10Gbps of 5G in the next 10 years. The bandwidth of broadband communication will soon reach 400Gbps per port. All of these challenges are drivers of R&D of high-end IC for communications. At the same time, R&D of low cost IC is also driven by volume communication markets including IoT (Internet of Things, including ZegBee, WIA-PA), Bluetooth, NFC (Near Field Communication, such as BAN: Body Area Communication, RFID), and other emerging technologies. Challenges on another side are low cost and low power consumption.