Abstract
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] .