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]
.