Many see great value in papers about hardware developed by industry that apply or combine novel ideas. Such papers are unlikely to be accepted by conferences in the current reviewing ecosystem, since they are so different. Retrospective industrial product papers remain valuable complements to academic research papers. Hence, we have a special issue for commercial products.

Guidelines for this special issue

Papers should ideally include retrospective evaluations of real working products rather than speculation about hardware that might be built. A secondary target is papers on planned products that were cancelled but present interesting insights or lessons learned. The products must be either sold separately, available in the cloud, or deployed internally. This special issue is not intended for research projects, which are often published by conferences, and so don’t need special consideration. The first author, and virtually all authors, must work in industry. This target is not intended for projects where a student intern spends a summer in industry or a faculty member spends a sabbatical and writes a paper about it. Papers that don’t match guidelines will be rejected without review.

Important dates

  • Submissions due: April 27, 2020
  • Initial notifications: June 29, 2020
  • Revised papers due: August 03, 2020
  • Final notifications: September 7, 2020
  • Final versions due: September 19, 2020
  • Publication: November/December 2020

Submission guidelines

Articles should be no more than 5,000 words, including figures (each of which counts as 250 words). Submit electronically through ScholarOne Manuscripts, selecting this special-issue option. Article templates are not required, but can be found here. Other author information regarding article preparation and submission can be found here.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors Sophia Shao and David Patterson at micro6-2-2020@computer.org, or editor-in-chief Lizy K. John at ljohn@ece.utexas.edu.

Call for Papers: IEEE Micro Special Issue on Commercial Products 2020