We hope that the readers will enjoy this special issue and that the contributions presented here will stimulate their interests in the forthcoming technologies for circuits and systems.

N RECENT years, we have observed spectacular advance-ments in the area of nano-circuits and systems at severallevels, from the fabrication material and device levels to thesystem and application levels.New emerging materials provide us with a wealth of newdevices such as (silicon) nanowires, graphene, and carbonnanotubes fabricated in various technologies. Applications ofthese devices are vast and include, but are not limited to, newcomputing and memory structures, super-capacitors, as wellas nanobio-sensors based on the molecular combination ofmolecular probes to electronic devices.At the system level, we see the useful and prolific combi-nation of components such as sensors and data acquisition sys-tems,energyharvesting,andstorageunits,aswellassignalcon-ditioning,processing,andcommunicationsubsystemsdesignedin heterogeneous technologies. The design and realization ofsuch systems require research in related areas, from circuits toarchitectures and to reliable computing.At the application level, we witness the emergence of pro-totypes and products for personalized medicine (e.g., chemicalandbiologicalanalysis,medicalstimulators,labs-on-chips),forenvironmental control (e.g., sensor networks, smart buildings,smart city, smart grid) and for the consumer market (e.g., nextgeneration cell phone systems, image and signal sensors/pro-cessors) and many others.All these systems are characterized by the growing hetero-geneity of components, ranging from materials and devices tocircuits and subsystems. Analysis and design of such heteroge-neous circuits and systems is a very important problem and todate current solutions have been just scratching the surface. Asitcanbeexpected,designandmanufacturingissueswillbecomemore prominent in the coming years with further device down-scaling and hybridization of technologies.The IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Forum on Emergingand Selected Topics (CAS-FEST)—held in Seoul, Korea, inMay 2012inconjunctionwith ISCAS, had the objective topro-vide the audience with a cross-sectional view of the aforemen-tioned areas and challenges. The thematic focus of the CAS-FEST 2012 was Heterogeneous Nano Circuits and Systems.This special issue of the J

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