IEEE Design & Test of Computers

About IEEE Design & Test of Computers

IEEE Design & Test of Computers — the Magazine That Became IEEE Design & Test

IEEE Design & Test of Computers was the title, from 1984 to 2012, of the IEEE's peer-reviewed technical magazine on the design and testing of microelectronic systems. In 2013 the magazine was retitled IEEE Design & Test, the name it carries today. This Journals World record documents the earlier title and its identifiers — print ISSN 0740-7475 and online ISSN 1558-1918 — and this profile therefore does two things at once: it describes the magazine as it existed under the of Computers title, and it explains how that publication continues, so that a reader who finds a citation from 1995 and a reader looking for the current submission page both end up in the right place.

The most important fact about this publication is its genre. It is a magazine, not a transactions journal. IEEE's own descriptions call it a magazine throughout, co-sponsored by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, with the IEEE Computer Society as its publishing home. Its articles are peer reviewed, but they are written for practice: the magazine focuses on current and near-future practice and publishes tutorials, how-to articles and real-world case studies alongside technical papers, plus interviews with technology leaders and roundtable discussions. Anyone evaluating this title against a research journal on the basis of article format alone will misunderstand it. Its unit of value is not only the novel result; it is also the explained method that a working design or test engineer can apply on Monday morning.

Quick Facts

History

The magazine was introduced in February 1984, in a period when the IEEE Computer Society was deliberately creating specialty magazines modelled on the tutorial, practice-oriented approach of its flagship magazine Computer. A Computer Society history records that the society introduced IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and IEEE Micro in 1981, both IEEE Design & Test and IEEE Software in February 1984, and IEEE Expert in 1986, because member interest in tutorial-oriented material in specialty areas had outgrown what a single general magazine could carry. The new title's subject was the rapidly professionalising discipline of designing and, especially, testing digital systems: as integrated circuits grew denser, the question of how to verify that a manufactured chip actually worked became an engineering field in its own right, with its own conferences, tools and economics.

For twenty-nine years the magazine appeared as IEEE Design & Test of Computers. Its pages tracked the field's main transitions: the rise of electronic design automation as a software industry, design-for-testability methods such as scan and built-in self-test, boundary-scan standards work, the move from chips to systems-on-chip built from reusable intellectual-property blocks, verification as a discipline distinct from design, design for manufacturing and yield as processes shrank, and the growing weight of embedded software and low-power design. Because it published tutorials and case studies as well as research, its archive reads differently from a transactions archive of the same years: it shows not only what was discovered but what practitioners were being taught to do, and which industrial problems — test cost, time to market, yield loss, verification bottlenecks — were considered urgent at the time.

In 2013 the magazine dropped of Computers from its title and continued as IEEE Design & Test. IEEE sources describe the retitling as reflecting a broader contemporary scope: the systems being designed and tested were no longer described adequately by the word computers, encompassing as they did embedded systems, systems-on-chip and the hardware of fields from communications to automotive electronics. The retitling is a continuation, not a new publication and not a cessation. Volume and community continued, the co-sponsoring societies continued, and the editorial mission — models, methods and tools used to design and test microelectronic systems — is stated in nearly identical words for the old and new titles. Bibliographically, however, the change matters: the retitled magazine is listed with its own ISSN, 2168-2356, so citations, catalogue records and subscription records before and after 2013 must be kept distinct, exactly as this site keeps this 1984–2012 record distinct from any record for the current title.

Scope in Depth

Design of microelectronic systems

The magazine offers original works describing the models, methods and tools used to design microelectronic systems from devices and circuits to complete systems-on-chip and embedded software. Design coverage includes semiconductor integrated-circuit design, semiconductor intellectual-property blocks and their reuse, and the electronic design automation tools on which modern design depends. Articles in this strand typically present a method at a level a practitioner can evaluate: what problem it solves, what it costs in area, power or design time, and how it behaved on a real design rather than only on a constructed example.

Verification

Verification — establishing that a design does what its specification requires before it is manufactured — grew during this magazine's lifetime from a stage of the design flow into its largest consumer of engineering effort, and the magazine treated it as a first-class topic in its own right. Simulation, formal methods, coverage measures, assertion-based approaches and hardware-assisted verification all fall within the territory, presented with the magazine's characteristic emphasis on usability in an industrial flow.

Test

Test is the second half of the title and historically the magazine's distinguishing strength. Test coverage addresses how manufactured devices are shown to be free of defects: fault models, test generation, design for testability, built-in self-test, test compression, diagnosis, and the economics of test time and equipment. The archive also preserves the community's debates about how much test coverage is enough and why the industry makes the test decisions it does — including, memorably, work on the psychology of electronic test, examining why engineers pursue one additional percent of one kind of coverage while leaving larger gains of another kind unclaimed. That willingness to publish reflective and even behavioural analysis of engineering practice is part of what separates a magazine from a purely archival journal.

Design for manufacturing, yield, power and embedded software

IEEE's topic lists for the magazine add design for manufacturing and yield, low-power and energy-efficient design, embedded software and systems, practical technology, and standards. Each reflects a stage at which design decisions meet physical or commercial reality: a design that cannot be manufactured at acceptable yield, that exceeds its power budget, or whose embedded software cannot be validated, fails as surely as a design with a logic error. Standards coverage matters because design and test are coordinated activities across companies — intellectual-property blocks, tools and test interfaces must fit together — and the magazine has served as a place where the practice surrounding new standards is explained to the engineers who must implement them.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

IEEE's society pages state the magazine's review arrangements plainly: the articles are peer reviewed in accordance with the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, each published article was reviewed by a minimum of two independent reviewers using a single-blind process in which reviewers know the authors' identities but authors do not know the reviewers', and articles are screened for plagiarism before acceptance. The same descriptions state what the magazine will consider: original works that enhance the existing body of knowledge; original review articles and surveys are acceptable even where new data or concepts are not presented; results should not have been submitted or published elsewhere; expanded versions of conference publications may be submitted; and articles must be intelligible and written in standard English. The explicit welcome for surveys and expanded conference versions fits the magazine format — a strong conference paper in this field often reaches the magazine's wider practitioner readership in an extended, more tutorial form.

Editors named in catalogue listings for the current title have included Joerg Henkel, and a later listing names Partha Pratim Pande of Washington State University as editor. Treat editor names as time-stamped: over a run that began in 1984 the magazine has had many editors, and an author preparing a submission today should take the name from the current IEEE page for IEEE Design & Test, not from any secondary profile.

How to Read the Archive of This Record

Citations to IEEE Design & Test of Computers belong to 1984–2012. A citation dated after 2012 that uses the old title is either an error or a reference to the magazine's history, and a citation dated before 2013 that uses the short current title is equally suspect. When building a bibliography, preserve the title as printed on the article itself; databases that normalise the title across the whole run can silently rewrite history in both directions. The ISSN pair on this record — 0740-7475 and 1558-1918 — is the pair to use for the old-title run; the retitled magazine's listed ISSN, 2168-2356, should not be attached to pre-2013 articles.

For literature searching, the magazine is indexed within IEEE Xplore as part of the continuing publication, and catalogue listings record indexing that includes Scopus. Searchers should query both titles, because indexing services differ in whether they present the run under the earlier title, the current title, or a linked pair of records, and a search under only one form can return a truncated archive that looks like the whole of it. Metrics follow the same rule: figures quoted for IEEE Design & Test in recent IEEE listings — an impact factor around 1.5 to 2 and a CiteScore in the region of 3.6 to 4.2 in the listings consulted — describe the current title in those years, not the 1984–2012 magazine, and must not be backdated onto this record.

Who This Magazine Is For

The readership is the practising design, verification and test community together with the researchers who supply its methods: integrated-circuit and system-on-chip designers, verification engineers, test engineers, EDA tool developers, and academics working on design automation. Authors should write for that mixed audience, which means defining specialist terms, showing industrial relevance, and preferring a worked example to an unsupported generality. Purely theoretical work with no route into a design or test flow, and product announcements with no technical substance, both miss the magazine's purpose from opposite directions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is IEEE Design & Test of Computers still published under that name? No. It was published under that title from 1984 to 2012 and continues from 2013 as IEEE Design & Test. The publication itself did not cease.

Is it a journal or a magazine? IEEE describes it as a magazine. Its technical articles are peer reviewed — a minimum of two independent reviewers, single-blind, with plagiarism screening — but its format includes tutorials, how-to articles, case studies, interviews, columns and roundtables alongside research papers.

What are the ISSNs on this record? Print 0740-7475 and online 1558-1918, for the title as it ran to 2012. The retitled magazine is listed separately with ISSN 2168-2356.

Who sponsors it? It is co-sponsored by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, and published through the IEEE Computer Society.

Can a conference paper be expanded for the magazine? IEEE's description says expanded versions of conference publications may be submitted, provided the work has not been published or submitted elsewhere in that form and is written intelligibly in standard English.

What could not be verified for this profile? Submission fees, article processing charges and current acceptance rates for the magazine are not publicly disclosed in the official descriptions consulted, and this profile does not estimate them. Current editorial leadership should be confirmed on the live IEEE page.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is anchored in this site's record for the title (IEEE as publisher; ISSNs 0740-7475 and 1558-1918), in IEEE society pages for the magazine — the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation pages, which give the scope, the topic list, the co-sponsorship, the peer-review arrangements and the statement that it was published as IEEE Design & Test of Computers between 1984 and 2012 — in an IEEE Computer Society history recording the February 1984 introduction of the magazine, and in catalogue listings for the retitled magazine's ISSN and frequency. Where a figure belongs only to the current title, the text says so explicitly.

Special Sections, Columns and the Magazine's Teaching Role

A defining device of this magazine, visible throughout the of Computers years, is the special section or special issue devoted to one emerging problem, introduced by guest editors and built from a coordinated set of articles. The surviving record of editor-in-chief messages and roundtables from the early 2000s shows the rhythm of that model: issues organised around enabling intellectual property, building a community, deep submicron challenges, predictability in design and manufacturing, the EDA challenge of design for manufacturability, manufacturing test problems, silicon for embedded multimedia, verification synergies, on-chip networks and three-dimensional integration. Roundtables, in which several practitioners debate one question — on-chip multiprocessors, C and C++ modelling for systems-on-chip, advances in electronic system-level design — allowed the magazine to publish informed disagreement, something a conventional research article cannot easily do. For a historian of the field, these editorial artefacts are primary sources: they record which problems the community's leadership judged most pressing in a given year, in their own words, before the outcomes were known.

The teaching role follows from the same format. A transactions paper is written for readers who already share its background; a magazine tutorial is written for a competent engineer moving into a new area — a designer who must suddenly understand test, or a test engineer confronting a new design style. During the magazine's run, generations of engineers entered design and test work as the field industrialised, and tutorial material in a society magazine was one of the main mechanisms by which shared practice spread from a few leading companies to the whole profession. That is also why the magazine's archive remains useful after its techniques have been superseded: it explains, in the language of its moment, why a method took the shape it did, which is exactly the information a reader needs before judging whether a legacy flow should be kept, adapted or replaced.

A Practical Test Before Submitting to the Current Title

An author deciding whether work belongs in IEEE Design & Test today can apply three questions drawn from the magazine's own stated mission. First, does the paper describe a model, a method or a tool — something another engineer could adopt — rather than only a result? Second, could a practising designer, verifier or test engineer outside the author's sub-specialty follow it and judge its usefulness, with the background explained rather than assumed? Third, does it speak to current or near-future practice: a process node, a design style, a verification bottleneck or a test cost that readers are facing now or are about to face? A paper that answers yes to all three is written in this magazine's language, under either of its titles, across all four decades of its history.

Finally, a word on the record itself. Keeping a separate Journals World record for the 1984–2012 title, rather than folding it silently into the current title's record, serves the readers who arrive with an old citation in hand. They can confirm from this page that their citation is real, that its ISSNs differ from the current ones for a documented reason, and that the magazine they are looking for still exists under a shorter name — which is exactly the chain of facts a good catalogue record exists to provide.