Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, 43, 123–125, 2005 c 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Manufactured in The Netherlands.


Guest Editorial This special issue of the Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (ALOG) is devoted to topics from the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS2003) that was held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 14th–17th December 2003. 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 Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing fields, ranging from basic analog building blocks to system applications on several related domains such as biomedical and telecommunications. The major areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering covered by ICECS2003, drew 541 submissions from 56 countries spanning the globe, 336 contributions were selected by more than 300 reviewers for presentations. Among the published contributions in the ICECS2003 proceedings, a pre-selection of 21 papers has been completed, we sent out 21 invitations for contributions to this Special issue. We received 14 full manuscripts and after the assessment of reviewers, 8 of them have been accepted for publication in this special issue. The presented contributions in this special issue deal with Low Voltage Wide-Input-Range Bulk-Input CMOS OTA, Low Voltage Self-Calibrated CMOS DAC, Low-Voltage Crystal-Based Ring Oscillator, High Performance Clock/Data Recovery Circuits, Power Recovery Circuits for Medical Implantable Devices, Low Power Static Differential CMOS Logic, Inductive Coupling in Wide Global Signal Busses, Coprocessor for GLCM and Haralick Texture Features and medical applications. Selecting only 8 papers out of 336 papers 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. We would like to thank the numerous volunteers that helped to review the submitted papers. We thank the authors for their work in submitting manuscripts; it has been gratifying to learn more about the advances first described at ICECS2003. We wish to thank Professor Mohamed Ismail, Editor-in-chief of ALOG and the

ICECS steering committee for giving us the opportunity to organize this prestigious IEEE conference in Sharjah and to lead this special issue. We also wish to express our deepest gratitude for the efforts of the Kluwer (now Springer) personnel. This special issue is only possible with their expert help. We feel that the Technical Program is the result of a truly international cooperation of experts. We feel very much indebted to them for their invaluable help to keep the level of ICECS at the high standard that our scientific community has grown accustomed to expect from it. On the other hand, 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. Mohamad Sawan, Guest Editor PolySTIM Neurotechnologies Laboratory Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. Montr´eal, Canada Mohammed Al-Mualla, Guest Editor Electronics Engineering Department Etisalat College of Engineering Sharjah, United Arab Emirates Bassel Soudan, Guest Editor Electrical/Electronics and Computer Engineering Department University of Sharjah Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Mohamad Sawan received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Universit´e Laval, Canada in 1984, the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees, both in electrical

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Sawan, Al-Mualla and Soudan

engineering, from Universit´e de Sherbrooke, Canada, in 1986 and 1990 respectively, and postdoctorate training from McGill University, Canada in 1991. He joined Ecole Polytechnique de Montr´eal in 1991 where he is currently a Professor in Microelectronics. His scientific interests are the design and test of mixed-signal (analog, digital and RF) circuits and systems, the digital and analog signal processing, the modeling, design, integration, assembly and validation of advanced wirelessly powered and controlled monitoring and measurement techniques. These topics are oriented toward the biomedical implantable devices and telecommunications applications. Dr. Sawan is a holder of a Canadian Research Chair in Smart Medical Devices. He is leading the Microelectronics Strategic Alliance of Quebec (Regroupement strat´egique en micro´electronique du Qu´ebec—ReSMiQ). He is founder of the Eastern Canadian IEEE-Solid State Circuits Society Chapter and the IEEE-Northeastern workshop on Circuits and Systems (NewCAS), cofounder of the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society, and founder of PolySTIM neurotechnology laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. He published more than 250 papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings and was awarded 6 patents. He is editor of the Springer Mixed-signal Letters, Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE CAS Society. He received the Barbara Turnbull 2003 award for spinal cord research. He is Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of the IEEE.

Mohammed Al-Mualla (S’98, M’00) received the B. Eng. (Honors) degree in Communications from Etisalat College of Engineering, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in 1995, and the M.Sc. degree in Communications and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K. in 1997. In 2000, he received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Bristol with a thesis titled “Video Coding for Mobile Communications: a Motion-Based Approach”. Dr. Al-Mualla is currently

with Etisalat College of Engineering, where he is the deputy head of the Electronic Engineering Department. He also leads the Multimedia Communication and Signal Processing (MCSP) research group within the College. His research interests include multimedia communication over networks, smart antennas and adaptive array processing. Dr. Al-Mualla has published widely in refereed technical journals and international conferences. He is also the first author of the book “Video Coding for Mobile Communications”, Signal Processing and Its Application Series, Academic Press, March 2002. Dr. Al-Mualla is a member of both the IEE and the IEEE with membership in the IEEE Signal Processing, Communication, Computer and Circuits and System Societies. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE UAE Section and the founding Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing/Communication Joint Societies Chapter in the UAE. He was a member of the organizing and technical program committees of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (ICECS2003), 14–17 December, 2003, Sharjah, UAE. He is also a member of the IEEE ICECS steering committee.

Bassel Soudan (S’89, M’94) received his B. Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering with highest honors from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1986. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in 1988 and 1994 respectively from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1994 through 1996, he was with Design Technology group at Intel Corporation in Hillsboro Oregon where he was involved in the development of Intel’s Athena suite of EDA CAD tools. He was particularly involved with the design of full chip layout tools and then the verification and validation effort of the suite. From 1996 through 1999, he was with the

Guest Editorial

Merced Microprocessor Design Team at Intel in Santa Clara California. He was a member of the Full-Chip Layout Design Automation team responsible for developing, maintaining, and supporting the suite of full chip layout tools utilized by the project. In the last six months of the project, he was part of the team responsible for assembling and verifying the design. Since 1999, he is an assistant professor at the Department of Electrical/Electronics and Computer Engineering at the

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University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. His primary research interests include interconnect design, high performance computer architecture and design of new EDA tools and methodologies. He is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation, and the ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture.