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This paper aims to take stock of recent advances in the field of energy-quality (EQ) scalable circuits and systems, as promising direction to continue the historical exponential energy downscaling under diminished returns from technology and voltage scaling. EQ-scalable systems explicitly trade off energy and quality at different levels of abstraction and sub-systems, dealing with “quality” as an explicit design requirement, and reducing energy whenever the application, the task, or the dataset allow quality degradation (e.g., vision and machine learning). A general framework for EQ-scalable systems based on the concept of quality slack is presented along with scalable architectures. A taxonomy of techniques to trade off energy and quality, a VLSI perspective, and possible quality control strategies are then discussed. The state of the art is surveyed to put the advances in its different sub-fields into a unitary perspective …