Special issue: Highlights from the flagship Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems: selected papers from LASCAS 2013

It is a pleasure and a privilege to present to the readers of the Springer Journal on Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing (ALOG) a selection of the papers from the 4th edition of the Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems—LASCAS 2013, held in February 2013 in the historical Peruvian city of Cuzco. The LASCAS Symposium is the premier event in circuits and systems in that region of the Americas. The papers selected by the Guest Editors fall in the focus of this Journal, and are among the 10 % top quality of the 155 papers submitted to LASCAS 2013, and were selected by rigorous reviewing. While LASCAS contemplates applications and digital systems, most of the papers in this Special Issue address analog circuits and systems, the themes of interest to ALOG Journal readers. From the 119 papers which were accepted and published in the IEEE LASCAS Proceedings, a total of 27 works were nominated and invited to submit a substantially improved manuscript on the same subject to this Special Issue of LASCAS 2013. The quality screening took advantage of the reviews and paper ratings for each of those 119 papers, which were narrowed down to 23 extended manuscripts. These went through a second-round of peer-review process and 14 papers, substantially extended versions from the LASCAS Symposium, were finally selected for this Special Issue, as the highlights from the flagship Latin American Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The papers in this Special Issue come from the Americas (North and South) and Europe. The 14 selected papers cover a wide range of topics, from analog circuits design at ultra-low voltages, to amplifiers design, integrated circuits, wireless, and digital systems design, and up to topics at the application of communications and arithmetic circuits. The first 3 papers in the Special Issue deal with low voltage analog CMOS design. The paper ‘‘Fully Integrated Inductive Ring Oscillators Operating at VDD below 2kT/ q’’ by M. Machado et alli presents oscillators with two inductive loading schemes to work under extremely low DC supplies. H. Hernandez et alli propose and show in their paper a silicon implementation of ‘‘A fully Integrated Boost Converter For Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting’’ which upconverts from very low voltage supplies. The paper ‘‘Sub-1 V Band-Gap Based and MOS ThresholdVoltage Based Voltage References in 0.13 lm CMOS’’ by D.M. Colombo et alli explores and compares low-voltage DC reference circuits with different circuit approaches possible in standard CMOS, compared to diode-based BGRs. Two papers on DC and instrumentation amplifiers designs target improvements on either DC gain or CMRR. H. Gomez-Ortiz introduces a ‘‘Robust to PVT Enhanced DC Gain Amplifier Using No Miller Capacitor Feedforward Compensation’’ in his paper, where a feedforward scheme improves DC gain and common mode range. C. Silva-Cardenas Maestria de Ingenieria de las Telecomunicaciones, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Ave. Universitaria 1801, Lima 32, Peru e-mail: csilva@pucp.edu