Preface: Special Issue on Emerging Techniques for Nano-Scales CMOS Integrated Circuits Design

Despite Challenges, CMOS Technology is here to Stay. While several promising alternatives to replace silicon based CMOS technologies are actively developed; CMOS maturity, low manufacturing cost, high speed and low power consumption will extend its dominance for at least in the next ten to fifteen years. As the CMOS technology scales down to the nanometer level IC designers are facing several challenges including supply voltage reduction, excessive leakage current and statistical uncertainty with process variations and mismatch that all restrict the design of high performance digital, analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuits. Also the growing demand for more complex ultra-low power devices exacerbates these challenges and makes the operation reliability of integrated circuits despite of variations a hard to achieve goal.