Editorial TVLSI Positioning - Continuing and Accelerating an Upward Trajectory

I. VLSI Systems: A Glance Into The Last Decades Since their inception in 1970s, VLSI systems have enabled several new technological capabilities and made them accessible to an unceasingly wider range of users, reaching a scale that has been exponentially increasing over the decades [1] (see Fig. 1). Relentless integration of more complex systems has driven such remarkable evolution, as made possible by the inexorable miniaturization. As shown in Fig. 1, more functionality has been crammed in a consistently smaller form factor, as exemplified by the physical volume shrinking of computers by 100 X/decade [2], [3]. At the same time, the energy per task has been decreasing at 10-100 X/decade, as shown in Fig. 2, for several systems and system-on-chip subsystems [4]. This allowed packing more capabilities into the same power envelope, as generally observed in the electronic systems, even before the advent of the integrated circuit [5].