Wafer-scale integration has long been the dream of system designers. Instead of chopping a wafer into a few hundred or a few thousand chips, one would just connect the circuits on the entire wafer. What an enormous capability wafer-scale integration would offer: all those millions of circuits connected by high-speed on-chip wires. Unfortunately, the best known optical systems can provide suitably ?ne resolution only over an area much smaller than a whole wafer. There is no known way to pattern a whole wafer with transistors and wires small enough for modern circuits. Statistical defects present a ?rmer barrier to wafer-scale integration. Flaws appear regularly in integrated circuits; the larger the circuit area, the more probable there is a ?aw. If such ?aws were the result only of dust one might reduce their numbers, but ?aws are also the inevitable result of small scale. Each feature on a modern integrated circuit is carved out by only a small number of photons in the lithographic process. Each transistor gets its electrical properties from only a small number of impurity atoms in its tiny area. Inevitably, the quantized nature of light and the atomic nature of matter produce statistical variations in both the number of photons de?ning each tiny shape and the number of atoms providing the electrical behavior of tiny transistors. No known way exists to eliminate such statistical variation, nor may any be possible.

Wafer-scale integration has long been the dream of system designers. Instead of chopping a wafer into a few hundred or a few thousand chips, one would just connect the circuits on the entire wafer. What an enormous capability wafer-scale integration would offer: all those millions of circuits connected by high-speed on-chip wires. Unfortunately, the best known optical systems can provide suitably ?ne resolution only over an area much smaller than a whole wafer. There is no known way to pattern a whole wafer with transistors and wires small enough for modern circuits. Statistical defects present a ?rmer barrier to wafer-scale integration. Flaws appear regularly in integrated circuits; the larger the circuit area, the more probable there is a ?aw. If such ?aws were the result only of dust one might reduce their numbers, but ?aws are also the inevitable result of small scale. Each feature on a modern integrated circuit is carved out by only a small number of photons in the lithographic process. Each transistor gets its electrical properties from only a small number of impurity atoms in its tiny area. Inevitably, the quantized nature of light and the atomic nature of matter produce statistical variations in both the number of photons de?ning each tiny shape and the number of atoms providing the electrical behavior of tiny transistors. No known way exists to eliminate such statistical variation, nor may any be possible.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th National Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology, NCCET 2013, held in Xining, China, in July 2013. The 26 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 234 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: Application Specific Processors; Communication Architecture; Computer Application and Software Optimization; IC Design and Test; Processor Architecture; Technology on the Horizon.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Conference on High Performance Networking, Computing, and Communication systems, ICHCC 2011, held in Singapore in May 2011. The conference was held together with the Second International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, ICTMF 2011, which proceedings are published in CCIS 164. The 84 revised selected papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The topics covered range from computational science, engineering and technology to digital signal processing, and computational biology to game theory, and other related topices.

Transactions on HiPEAC is a new journal which aims at the timely dissemination of research contributions in computer architecture and compilation methods for high-performance embedded computer systems. It publishes original research on systems targeted at specific computing tasks as well as systems with broad application bases. Its scope covers all aspects of computer architecture, code generation and compiler optimization methods.