Some interesting papers in TVLSI Jan 2011:

• Exploring Area and Delay Tradeoffs in FPGAs With Architecture and Automated Transistor Design, by Ian Koun and Jonathan Rose from Toronto. The design space of FPGA architecture is large. Part of the design space is shown to narrow the gap between FPGA and ASIC in terms of delay and area.
• Location Cache Design and Performance Analysis for Chip Multiprocessors, from Intel.

Transaction on Automation Science and Engineering Jan 2011 has a special issue on Equipment and Operations Automation in the Semiconductor Industry:

• Spatial Variance Spectrum Analysis and Its Application to Unsupervised Detection of Systematic Wafer Spatial Variations, from National Taiwan University.
• Automated Detection and Classification of Non-Wet Solder Joints, from ASU. Image sensors are deployed.

Transactions on Computers Feb 2011 is a special issue on Computer Arithmetic.

Design exploration of hybrid caches with disparate memory technologies, from PSU and IBM, in TACO Dec 2010.