IEEE Micro, a bimonthly publication of the IEEE Computer Society, reaches an international audience of microcomputer and microprocessor designers, system integrators, and users. Readers want to increase their technical knowledge and learn the latest industry trends.

Scope

IEEE Micro addresses users and designers of microprocessors and microprocessor systems, including managers, engineers, consultants, educators, and students involved with computers and peripherals, components and subassemblies, communications, instrumentation and control equipment, and guidance systems. Contributions should relate to the design, performance, or application of microprocessors and microcomputers. Tutorials, review papers, and discussions are also welcome. Sample topic areas include architecture, communications, data acquisition, control, hardware and software design/implementation, algorithms (including program listings), digital signal processing, microprocessor support hardware, operating systems, computer aided design, languages, application software, and development systems.

Special Issue on AI for Hardware and Hardware for AI
Submission Date: 2025-04-25

For years, the computational landscape, stretching from data centers and supercomputers to simple home devices, has predominantly depended on general-purpose processors which were sustainable while Moore’s law guaranteed that chip transistor counts would double approximately every two years. Today, however, as the pace of Moore’s law decelerates, we have witnessed an increasing shift toward hardware accelerators, designed to efficiently utilize hardware resources by concentrating solely on implementing the specific demands of target applications. Hardware accelerators, primarily engineered for an array of AI applications, from computer vision to recommendation systems and natural language processing, have been gaining growing traction, with substantial industrial investments and increasing scholarly interest. While the shift toward hardware accelerators has proven their capabilities, they face new challenges with major AI growth. AI algorithms are not only scaling in size rapidly but also evolving at an accelerated rate. The scale and diversity in modern AI pose a substantial challenge in the design of hardware accelerators for them. As a result, this IEEE Micro Special Issue seeks articles not only related to the hardware accelerators for the next generation of AI but also to the exploration of how AI itself can facilitate the creation of cost-efficient, fast, and scalable hardware. This issue’s topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    Scalable hardware accelerators for the next generation of large AI models 
    Deploying new technologies (e.g., in-memory computing, photonics, analog computing) for AI efficiency
    Sparsity-aware optimizations techniques for efficient AI 
    Integration of AI techniques to expedite the hardware/software co-design
    Rethinking the software/hardware stack for heterogeneous AI accelerator systems 
    Interconnection networks and data movement optimizations for the future of AI
    Using AI methods to enhance the reliability of hardware accelerators, design validation, and architecture front-end and backend
    Investigating security and privacy challenges in AI-assisted hardware accelerator design