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Here’s an example of a general purpose, analog computer: https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/exhibits/251/ https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/exhibits/251/ I’l

Here’s an example of a general purpose, analog computer: https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/exhibits/251/ https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/exhibits/251/ I’ll note that there’s been plenty of work on general-purpose, analog computing. Analog’s competitiveness also lives on in mixed-signal ASIC’s. The problem with new products, though, is analog requires fully-custom, circuit design. Outside some niche uses, you can’t just synthesize them from higher-level specs like you can digital designs with standard cells. That puts analog at a severe disadvantage on NRE cost. Especially as both design rules and mask costs increase with every node shrink.

KK7NIL 2y ago
Indeed, analog circuits are much more process sensitive (while digital circuits are defect sensitive), which makes their design slower and much more closely coupled to the specific process node that is being targeted. This is why now a days bleeding edge process nodes might be lacking in IO (especially fast serial IO) when they're first released. Additionally, analog just hasn't scaled for quite a while now. Even traditionally analog circuits like PLL's and IO are getting more and more digital as the digital scaling is making more digital architectures competitive in space and power when they weren't before.