Cover Feature Vlsi for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become ubiquitous in our daily life, with an estimated 30–75 million IoT devices expected to be connected through the Internet infrastructure by 2020.1,2 The explosive growth in the number and diversity of these devices and their applications are inevitably bringing many nontraditional challenges to the circuit and system design community.3 Perhaps the most crucial challenge is how to power these tens of billions of devices, as a significant portion of them are wireless and battery operated, with power consumption directly affecting their lifetime.3,4 Security and privacy are another concern because IoT devices cannot afford resource-demanding cryptographic protocols. Here, we assess a popular lowpower design methodology known as approximate computing and demonstrate how it can both reduce power and increase the security of IoT devices.