The issue that you are holding represents a milestone for a new initiative called “Late Breaking News” (LBN). This is the inaugural Special Issue of IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems II (TCAS II), presenting the best work submitted to the LBN track of International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2016. The purpose of the LBN initiative is to recognize the quickly changing nature of innovation in circuits and systems. We believe that this poses a unique opportunity for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS) to emerge as a forum in which innovations that cross boundaries and platforms from signal processing to architecture, and from theory to application, can all be evaluated holistically. With this in mind, we created the new effort of LBN to allow a small and elite set of the best and most timely new results in any given year to be presented at special sessions within ISCAS and then published in this special issue of TCAS II. We are delighted with the overwhelming response to the LBN call for papers. These papers were originally submitted as brief, one-page abstracts and a small subset were selected by a team of highly qualified reviewers and experts. The final selected papers were presented a few months later at ISCAS, giving audiences at ISCAS a chance to see very interesting work in a range of topics. For this year, the final sessions were organized around the following three themes: 1)

Emerging technologies and low-power subsystems;