ISLPED

Welcome to the 2004 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED)!

This year ISLPED moves back to California after a very successful year in Asia. ISLPED started as a workshop on low-power design in 1994 and is in its tenth year. This year we received papers in all aspects of low-power design from all over the world. This indicates the continuous international interest across the VLSI electronics community for low power design. Indeed, unique to ISLPED is that it brings together researchers from academia and industry with different backgrounds in technology, circuits, micro-architectures and architectures, digital and analog design, system design and software, having one common research concern: power-efficient design. We believe that this critical attribute of ISLPED continues to hold true even as power issues become more central in broader conferences such as ISSCC, DAC and ISCA. ISLPED provides a forum for lively exchange of ideas that span multiple disciplines and yet are aimed at solving the same challenge.

This year we received 204 submissions. Many thanks to all the authors who submitted papers: their work is the reason this symposium has become so successful. We were able to accept a total of 70 contributions (34% acceptance): 56 regular papers, and 14 poster papers. Regular papers have 6 pages in the proceedings while poster papers have 4 pages in the proceedings. The circuits and technology areas continue to be well represented, while micro-architecture, platform and software areas continue to see rapid growth in interest. We also have an excellent program of keynote, plenary, and embedded tutorial speakers. The embedded tutorials address some key new issues that have come to the forefront as we continue to scale down on feature and transistor sizes. It's the tyranny of the small -- effects that once were relegated as second-order e.g. leakage and manufacturing variations, are now macro effects that determine key attributes of high-performance designs. The keynote and plenary speakers bring a wealth of industry experience and are at the forefront of the battle against power consumption -- at the transistor, architecture and platform levels. The winners of the student design contest have a special session on Tuesday morning (their papers are not included in the proceedings). An industry sponsored cash award will be presented to each selected design entry.

Many thanks to the Technical Program Committee for all the hard work in the paper review, paper selection and session organization. The technical program committee also had the help of additional reviewers. We would also like to thank them for their contribution. This year we had a blind-review process which worked very well. The technical program committee met in April on the UC-Irvine campus. Even with economic constraints, we had a very large attendance. Thanks for your commitment to the symposium. Also thanks to the members of the organizing committee for all their hard work behind the scenes: Vijay Narayanan as Treasurer, Payam Heydari as Local Arrangements Chair, Mahmut Kandemir and Jihong Kim as Publicity Chairs, David Scott as Design Contest Chair, Diana Marculescu as Exhibits Chair. Thanks to Swarup Bhunia and Animesh Datta for taking care of the web-based paper submission. The symposium has received generous financial support from Intel, Texas Instruments, Synopsys, Sequence Design, IBM, Magma Design Automation, and Cadence.

We would especially like to acknowledge the financial support from <i>University of California's Industry-University Cooperative Research Program</i>. This financial support was critical in helping reduce the symposium registration fees.

ISLPED is sponsored by ACM SIGDA and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. It receives technical co-sponsorship from the IEEE Solid State Circuit Society and the IEEE Electron Devices Society. Finally, we would like to thank you, the audience and the reader for your interest and support of this symposium. We hope that you will find the symposium both stimulating and helpful. We appreciate your comments and suggestions.