Guest editorial: Introduction to the special issue on emerging technologies and designs for application-specific computing

The papers in this special section focuses on emerging technologies and designs for application specific computing systems. As device technology has rapidly evolved, application-specific computing (ASC) has emerged as a new field of research; ASC requires new criteria well beyond traditional practice. ASC is encountering substantial challenges at all levels from new devices, to innovative design principles and application domains. The focus of this special issue is on emerging technologies in both theory and practice for application-specific computing systems, architectures and processors, inclusive of optimized circuits and modules. AsCMOS technology reaches its scaling and power limitations, novel schemes and computational paradigms are sought for ASC, such as advanced in memory primitives, error tolerant computing, 3D circuit architecture and emerging application domains found in neural computation and hardware security. This special issue contains four papers chosen after an extensive review process from fifteen submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers cover four different ASC areas including: processors based on nonvolatile memories, approximate computing for error-tolerant applications to achieve low power designs, 3D arithmetic circuits for wide operands, and co-processors for post-quantum cryptographic homomorphic encryption.