About IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine

IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine

IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine was a practitioner-facing magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, published in the United States from 1985 to 2006. Its print ISSN is 8755-3996 and its electronic ISSN in the live Journals World record is 1558-1888. Unlike a research transactions title, it was created as a magazine: readable, tutorial and review-oriented writing about the design, implementation, packaging and manufacture of microelectronic and photonic devices, circuits and systems, aimed at practising engineers and students who could not be expected to read every specialist transactions paper.

That magazine identity is essential to profiling it honestly. IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine ceased publication in 2006, with its archive running from Volume 1, Issue 1 in 1985 to Volume 22, Issue 6 in 2006 in library holdings, and its full backfile remains accessible through IEEE Xplore. It does not accept new submissions, it has no current article processing charge, and it should never be presented as an active journal inviting manuscripts in 2026. Its value now is historical and educational: a curated record of how circuits and devices engineering explained itself to practitioners during two decisive decades of VLSI growth, semiconductor scaling and photonic development.

The live record's h-index of 50 and its citation totals reflect that long archive. A ceased magazine can continue to be cited for years because its tutorials and reviews remain useful introductions to a technique, and because engineers returning to a classic design problem often start with an accessible magazine treatment before moving to the primary transactions literature.

Journal Identity at a Glance

Title: IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine. Print ISSN 8755-3996; electronic ISSN 1558-1888. Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), United States. Society association: presented by IEEE sources as a publication of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and, in its origins, as the magazine of IEEE Division I, bringing together circuits and electron devices societies. Dates: 1985 to 2006. Status: ceased publication in 2006; archive in IEEE Xplore. Type: professional magazine, not a primary research transactions journal.

Abbreviation used in IEEE lists: IEEE Circuits Devices Mag. Those lists place it alongside, but distinct from, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine. The distinction matters. IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine is a different title with its own history, revived in a later series, while IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine is the 1985–2006 Division I magazine. Confusing the two produces false claims about continuity, current editors and submission routes. This profile concerns only the Circuits and Devices title with ISSN 8755-3996.

Origins: The First Division Magazine

A magazine for a newly organised division

An oral history by Kenneth Laker, preserved by the Engineering and Technology History Wiki, recalls how he and Rick Dill worked to create a cohesive Division I out of circuits and devices when IEEE Technical Activities was being reorganised in 1983, went to the society administrative committees to gain support, and promised to create a division magazine — described as the first of its kind. The purpose, in that account, was to bring exciting new developments in the Division I societies' technologies to students, because undergraduate students in particular could not read the specialist journals. Articles were to be obtained from strong authors and edited to ensure readability, with support from all the societies for several years.

Why readability was the point

That founding purpose explains the magazine's editorial choices throughout its life. A transactions paper assumes a reader who already knows the subfield, its notation and its open problems. A magazine article assumes a competent engineer from a neighbouring subfield, or a student, who needs the problem framed, the device physics explained without unnecessary opacity, and the practical consequences drawn out. Editing for readability was therefore not a lowering of standards; it was the magazine's technical contribution. In a period when VLSI design, semiconductor fabrication and photonic devices were changing quickly, a trusted synthesis saved practitioners from piecing together a field from scattered primary papers.

Place between Spectrum and the Transactions

IEEE sources describe the magazine as sitting between the research-focused IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and the broad engineering audience of IEEE Spectrum. That positioning is accurate and useful. Spectrum addressed engineers across all of electrical engineering; the Transactions addressed researchers in a specialty; Circuits and Devices addressed the practising circuits and devices community in depth, but in magazine form. Readers who understand that spectrum of IEEE publishing will not judge the magazine by transactions criteria, nor expect transactions-level novelty from every article.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The magazine covered analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design, semiconductor device fabrication and process technology, photonic and optoelectronic systems, VLSI design and high-speed digital circuits, and packaging and interconnect engineering. IEEE Technology Navigator's summary adds the underlying components, circuit architectures and photonic elements that formed its subject matter, and notes applications across those areas. The live Journals World record's scope lines — analog and mixed-signal design, low-power high-performance VLSI, FPGA techniques, semiconductor materials and devices, radio-frequency integrated circuits and optical devices — are consistent with that official description.

In practice, an issue might move from a device-level explanation of how transistor characteristics influence amplifier design to a system-level discussion of interconnect parasitics in high-speed digital circuits. That device-to-circuit pairing was the magazine's signature. It treated the boundary between device physics and circuit design as a working interface, not as a separation between two professions. As device dimensions shrank and process variation, power and interconnect delay became circuit problems, that pairing became more, not less, relevant, and the magazine's archive captures the profession learning that lesson in real time.

Photonic and optoelectronic content gave the magazine a breadth that a purely silicon VLSI title would have lacked. Semiconductor lasers, optical devices and photonic systems appeared as part of the same devices community, reflecting the society structure of Division I, which brought circuits and systems together with electron devices. For historians of technology, that breadth makes the magazine a useful source for how neighbouring communities understood each other's work in the 1980s and 1990s.

Content Style: Tutorials, Reviews and Practitioner Articles

Articles were frequently tutorials and technology reviews, in addition to technical articles written for accessibility. A good magazine article in this tradition begins with the engineering problem, explains the governing principles in the order a practitioner needs them, works through design trade-offs with examples, and ends with the state of practice and the obstacles that remain. References point the reader onward to the primary literature rather than attempting to replace it.

That style has consequences for citation. Magazine tutorials are often cited by authors who used them as an entry point, by teachers assigning them to students, and by engineers in industry who publish less frequently than academics but rely on synthesis. A citation count alone understates that teaching and practice influence. Conversely, a reader seeking the first announcement of a new result should look to the transactions and conference proceedings of the period, and use the magazine to understand the result's context and significance.

Society and professional material also belongs in a magazine's ecology, although the surviving descriptions emphasise technical content. IEEE magazines of this era typically carried news and context that helped a dispersed technical community recognise itself as a community. Even where a specific news item is no longer retrievable, the function is worth recording: the magazine was a shared reading experience for Division I engineers, not only a repository of isolated articles.

Publication History and Cessation in 2006

Library and IEEE sources agree on the broad chronology: the magazine began in 1985 and ceased in 2006. One library listing gives Volume 1, Issue 1, 1985 to Volume 22, Issue 6, 2006. A secondary bibliometric listing summarises history as 1985–1992 and 1994–2006, suggesting a pause or irregularity in the early 1990s that readers verifying a specific volume should check in IEEE Xplore rather than infer from a summary line. The safe, sourced statement is the overall span and the cessation year, both corroborated by the University of Central Florida library guide, which states plainly that the magazine covered the design, implementation, packaging and manufacture of microelectronic and photonic devices, circuits and systems and ceased publication in 2006.

Cessation does not mean disappearance. The full archive is accessible through IEEE Xplore, where individual articles retain their identifiers and can be cited normally. Libraries continue to list the title in journal holdings, and IEEE Technology Navigator maintains a topic page explaining what the magazine was, precisely because later readers still encounter its articles and need context. When a directory profile is written in the present tense as if the magazine were active, it misleads authors who might waste time preparing a submission to a title closed for two decades. Honest ceased status is therefore a service, not a dismissal.

Why IEEE magazines cease is a matter of publishing economics, society priorities and the migration of practitioner reading online; no official source consulted for this profile gives a single stated reason for this title's closure, so no reason is invented here. What can be said is that its functions — tutorial synthesis, technology review and community communication — continued in other IEEE magazines and in the Circuits and Systems Society's own magazine, without those titles being continuations of this one in bibliographic terms.

Indexing, Metrics and the Archive

The live Journals World record reported an h-index of 50 for this title. For a magazine that ceased in 2006, that figure indicates a substantial cited backfile: fifty articles have each been cited at least fifty times under the counting method of the source used for that record. Readers should not convert that into a current impact factor, which the magazine does not have as a ceased title, nor compare it directly with active journals whose metrics describe recent publication windows. The correct use of the figure is as evidence that the archive still matters.

IEEE Xplore is the authoritative route to the archive. Searching there by the ISSN, by the magazine title, or by a known article title will retrieve the version of record with its volume, issue and page or article details. Secondary bibliometric sites reproduce fragments of the magazine's history and ISSN, and they can be useful for a quick check, but they also reproduce errors and dated impact claims for ceased titles. Where a secondary site presents a recent impact trend for a magazine that closed in 2006, treat it as a data artefact, not as evidence of activity.

How to Use the Archive Today

For students, the magazine remains an unusually good entry point into classic circuits and devices topics. A tutorial written for practising engineers in, for example, analog design or semiconductor devices will often explain motivation and trade-offs more clearly than a compressed modern paper that assumes that background. Students should check dates carefully: a 1990s treatment of process technology describes the nodes and constraints of its time, and its value lies in principles and design reasoning, not in current fabrication parameters.

For practising engineers, the archive is useful when a legacy system, a long-lived product line or a classic circuit topology is still in service. Designs documented in the magazine's era remain embedded in industrial equipment, instruments and infrastructure, and the contemporary explanation of why a choice was made can be more informative than a modern retrospective. For researchers, the magazine provides context and historiography: how a technique was presented to the profession when it was new, which obstacles were thought important, and which predictions proved sound.

For librarians and directory editors, the key tasks are disambiguation and status. Keep this title separate from IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, record the 1985–2006 span, give both ISSNs, and mark the title as ceased with its archive in IEEE Xplore. A directory that performs those four tasks has done the reader a genuine service.

Relationship to Other IEEE Publications

Within IEEE publishing, titles form a family, and family resemblance causes confusion. IEEE Spectrum is the general engineering magazine. IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine serves the Circuits and Systems Society with its own history. The various IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and on Electron Devices publish primary research. IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine was the Division I magazine that drew those neighbouring communities together for a practitioner audience. Citing the wrong family member is a common student error; checking the ISSN before citing, 8755-3996 for this magazine, prevents it.

Authors working today who would once have written for this magazine should look instead to the current IEEE magazine that matches their society and audience, and should follow that magazine's own current author guidelines. No submission route for the ceased title exists, and any website claiming to accept submissions for IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine in the present day should be treated with caution and verified against IEEE's own publication listings.

Reading the Magazine Across Its Two Decades

The archive divides naturally into periods that a reader should keep in mind. In the mid-1980s, VLSI design was moving from specialist craft to a central industrial capability, and the magazine explained fabrication, design automation and testing to engineers who had trained when circuits were far less integrated. By the 1990s, low-power design, high-speed digital systems, radio-frequency integration and portable electronics had become pressing concerns, and coverage of power, interconnect and packaging reflects a profession discovering that success at smaller geometries created new limits at the system level. In its final years to 2006, photonic systems, advanced semiconductor devices and the continuing tension between device physics and circuit performance remained prominent, at a moment when dimensions and materials were again forcing designers to rethink assumptions.

Reading across those periods teaches a method as well as facts. The magazine repeatedly returned to first principles when a technology changed: what a device does, how its behaviour is modelled, where parasitics and variation enter, and how a designer should trade speed, power, area and reliability. That habit is why older tutorials can still orient a reader even when their process examples are dated. The specific numbers belong to their year; the reasoning about trade-offs transfers. A student who learns to separate the dated numbers from the durable reasoning will use the archive well, while a reader who copies either without checking will misuse it.

The magazine also preserves the language of its community at the time. Terms for design methods, device structures and packaging approaches appear as practitioners used them, before later terminology settled. For historians and for engineers tracing why a standard or a topology acquired its present name, that contemporary language is evidence. It shows what the community thought a new idea was when it arrived, not only what later textbooks decided it had been. That evidential value, together with its tutorial clarity, explains why citations to a magazine that closed in 2006 have continued to accumulate in the decades since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine still publishing?

No. It was issued from 1985 to 2006 and ceased publication in 2006. Its archive remains accessible through IEEE Xplore.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 8755-3996 and electronic ISSN 1558-1888, as recorded on the live Journals World record.

Was it a research journal or a magazine?

A professional magazine. It published technical articles, tutorials and technology reviews in accessible form for practising engineers and students, sitting between IEEE Spectrum and the research Transactions in audience and depth.

Who published it?

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), in the United States, as a Circuits and Systems Society and Division I magazine in origin.

Can I submit a manuscript to it?

No. As a ceased title it has no submission route. Authors should identify a current IEEE magazine matching their topic and audience and follow its current guidelines.

How do I access old articles?

Through IEEE Xplore, which holds the full archive, or through a library that lists the title in its holdings from Volume 1 in 1985 to Volume 22 in 2006.

Conclusion

IEEE Circuits and Devices Magazine deserves a profile that respects what it was: the first IEEE division magazine, created to make circuits and devices developments readable for students and practitioners, published from 1985 to 2006, and preserved in IEEE Xplore. Its tutorials on analog and VLSI design, semiconductor and photonic devices, packaging and interconnects still serve readers who need principles explained well. Recording its ceased status, its ISSN pair and its difference from similarly named IEEE magazines is the most useful thing a directory can do for this title today.