I am pleased to announce the 2018 JETTA-TTTC Best Paper Award. We congratulate the winning authors, Shyue-Kung Lu, Hao-Cheng Jheng, Hao-Wei Lin and Masaki Hashizume, for their paper “Address Remapping Techniques for Enhancing Fabrication Yield of Embedded Memories,” that appeared in Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications, Volume 34, Number 4, pp. 435–446, August 2018. See details following this editorial.

As in previous years, the selection of the best paper was a two-phase process. In the first phase, the editorial board examined all six issues of 2018 (volume 34) to recommend papers that seemed to stand out. In the second phase, starting from the result of the first phase, an awards committee selected the winner. This year’s awards committee, appointed by the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC) of the IEEE Computer Society, consisted of Xiaoqing Wen (Chair), Vishwani Agrawal, Jennifer Dworak, Salvador Mir and Nicola Nicolici. The winning authors will receive the award certificates next month at a plenary session of the International Test Conference in Washington, D.C., USA.

We derive this special issue from a joint conference named the 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design and 18th International Conference on Embedded Systems that took place in New Delhi, India during January 5–9, 2019. Through its long tradition, this conference has become a major technical event consisting of peer-reviewed papers, tutorials, invited keynotes, panels, industry exhibits and other items of current interest. The conference enjoys a worldwide participation and represents the best of India in VLSI. Although the conference covers the entire field of VLSI, a significant faction of the program is devoted to topics like test, verification and security, which fall within the scope of JETTA.

Our special issue guest editors, Kanad Basu, Mingsong Chen and Rubin Parekhji, had strong involvement in the preparation of the conference program. Based on the conference’s peer evaluation, they preselected 18 papers. They invited the authors to submit extended versions of papers for JETTA’s peer review and revision procedure. The final selection contains ten papers.

The individual interest area and expertise of each guest editor was critical to the formation of this issue. Kanad Basu works in hardware security, Mingsong Chen in verification and Rubin Parekhji in test. I refer readers to their Guest Editorial.

The three guest editors and their reviewers whose diligent and timely effort made this issue possible, deserve our gratitude. I hope readers will find the material informative, thought provoking, and beneficial in their work.