This special issue of VLSI Design is devoted to topics from the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits, and Systems (ICECS2006) that was held in Nice, France, 10th–13th December 2006. As in the last year, the selected papers reflect continuing trends toward higher levels of analog and digital circuit techniques covering a wide variety of subjects within the analog and RF integrated circuits and signal processing fields, ranging from basic analog building blocks to system applications.

The major areas of electronics, circuits, and systems covered by ICECS2006 drew 553 submissions from 52 countries spanning the globe; 345 contributions were selected by more than 200 reviewers for presentations. Among the published contributions in the ICECS2006 proceedings, a preselection of 20 papers has been completed and corresponding authors were invited for contributions to this special issue. We received 10 full manuscripts and after the assessment of reviewers, 9 of them have been accepted for publication in this special issue.

The presented contributions in this special issue deal with digital circuits and algorithms dedicated for numerous building blocks of telecommunication applications.

Selecting only 9 papers out of 345 contributions of the conference presentations is a difficult and critical task. We are aware that we probably missed many excellent contributions, but we do know that we did our best to put together a special issue as complete as possible.

The Technical Program of ICECS2006 is the result of a truly international cooperation of experts. We feel very much indebted to Technical Program Committee for its valuable help to keep the level of ICECS at the high standard that our scientific community has grown accustomed to expect from it. We wish to thank our coresearchers from all around the world for choosing to submit their contributions to ICECS for review. Due to their many and important contributions, we managed to create a technical program of high scientific quality. In fact, it has been gratifying to learn more about the advances first described at ICECS2006. We would like to thank the numerous volunteers who helped to review the submitted papers. We also wish to express our deepest gratitude for the efforts of Hindawi personnel. This special issue is only possible with their expert help.

Jean-Baptiste Begueret
Thierry Taris