9 ms·

Analog's answer to FPGA opens field to masses (2008)

78 points by pointfree 12y ago

pointfree 12y ago
Fast forward 6 years and it looks like they are available from a company called Anadigm ( http://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp http://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp ). This sounds like it could be a great fit for Software Defined Radio.
- mikepurvis 12y ago
  Dev kit is $200. Chip is listed at Arrow for ~$10, but out of stock. I wonder if you could do some interesting analog audio stuff, like building low part count multi-speaker crossover networks, etc. Then again, for $10 apiece, it probably still makes way more sense to just put a cortex or something on there and do it all digitally.
  - _-__--- 12y ago
    You could market it to the analog-or-nothing crowd in the audio community. Decreasing production time of "boutique" analog clone effects pedals could make you some cash.
    - mikepurvis 12y ago
      That would be neat— a reconfigurable effect pedal that you could download and install new patches for. The _real_ trick would be providing the option to route the signals out of this thing and through vacuum tube stages, so you're not stuck trying to build a decent overdrive or compressor with silicon-only components.
  - deutronium 12y ago
    You can buy the chips directly from them, for around ~$10 each.
- imrehg 12y ago
  They sell the dev kit for the current AN231E04 part, but at least the Asian distributor does not stock it (only back order), and over $200, but at least it is available from 1. If I'd just want the part, it comes in 1000 increments... I'd have some more ideas for lab instruments, but under these circumstances it cannot really be used for product development, sadly
  - pointfree 12y ago
    I just found that the part is available through distributors on alibaba one of them even selling in min orders of 1. http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_en&CatId=&SearchText=AN231E04 http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_...
    - pinkyand 12y ago
      With all the fake electronic parts coming from china, are those companies a trustworthy long term source for such companies ? Not sure. One common advice is to buy from authorized sources, and looking through octopart[1], arrow is the only distributor of anadgim, with 1000 units minimum quantities. [1]http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=anadigm&sortby=avg_price%20asc&start=0&limit=10 http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=anadigm&sortby=avg_price%...
reisgabrieljoao 12y ago
Rough estimates suggest there are around 3,000 analog engineers in the world That's the real order of magnitude of the number of analog engineers?
- otoburb 12y ago
  Analog designer experience and skills are akin to "black magic", at least as whispered in the halls of electrical engineering schools 15 years ago. Analog is just devilishly harder when compared to digital IC design; forget about hysteresis curve cutoffs and resulting 'clean' abstractions of 0 and 1.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Analog silicon designers? Maybe, although it may be underestimating the number outside the West. It's much less prevalent than digital logic, much harder, and slower moving industry as it doesn't benefit from Moore's law in the same way.
  - swamp40 12y ago
    I don't think they are talking about silicon designers. The article quotes the professor as hoping FPAA's will allow "a wide range of less-skilled users to try out sophisticated, low-power (analog) techniques". In other words, typical device-level design engineers.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      Right, that's his target market, not his existing analog engineer population.
- swamp40 12y ago
  Very few people use analog signal processing techniques these days. It used to be common up until about 10-15 years ago, but then DSP's came along. Now, you take a signal, buffer it by the minimuum amount necessary to get it into the DSP, and call it a day. The best case is, you don't touch the signal at all, because any caps, filters, op amps can all distort the original signal. You can do it all digitally, and it's much easier to modify on the fly if your technique isn't working well. Boards and boards full of touchy analog electronics have been replaced by a single DSP. And not many people are looking back.
drone 12y ago
Too bad the market is still tough for low-volume FPAA's (vs. FPGA's). A product I was working on last year desperately needed FPAA's in low volumes (think 1k-2k MOQ), and was shelved largely because the lack of market availability. The design was changed to reflect the lack of availability of a low-volume FPAA at a reasonable price point, but this drove the feature set down and the price up until the product was shelved. Until they make them as easily available and as low-cost and many comparable FPGAs, it's going to be hard to design niche-market products around them.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  What's the difference between a FPAA and the programmable analog blocks on products like Cypress' PSOC? Those chips are pretty common.
  - drone 12y ago
    In our experience, the primary issues was the available number of analog I/Os, we were doing large-scale matrix-like switching between analog sources. That is to say, the PSoCs contained a small number of analog I/Os that could be routed relative to a "dedicated" FPAA.
blt 12y ago
I wonder if you could use it to build a synthesizer. That would be amazing - a modular analog synthesizer on a chip.
- boomlinde 12y ago
  I believe I read a while that they demonstrated it in a synthesizer application at a music expo, and I've heard rumors that they are already used in some commercial analog synthesizers.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Audio-synthesis has been using these kinds of technologies for decades. Its not unusual for synth/audio-processor manufacturers to make their own custom ASIC's, FPGA's, even small-quantity chipfab runs, to provide their IP to the customer. Synthesis is very promiscuous in this regard; you can make sound with a surprising number of things in the universe.
    - boomlinde 12y ago
      I well aware of the prevalence of the technologies you list in the synthesizer industry, but custom ASICs or FPGAs are quite obviously not the same thing as FPAA.
      - fit2rule 12y ago
        If there's a way, the synth nerds will use it.
kens 12y ago
This article is from 2008. Is there any particular reason its here?
- pistle 12y ago
  This. I was about to bring up the Anadigm source and then saw the date. Not sure why this is news since there are products in the market and demand scale has not surfaced to help ramp up the supply availability and product variations that could make it a healthy market.
- mng2 12y ago
  I was expecting this to be about Silego products since that's what was featured in a recent newsletter. All of these parts seem pretty niche though.
deutronium 12y ago
I recently bought some FPAAs from Anadigm, specifically the 3.3V version: AN231E04-E2-QFNSP Interestingly they use a switched-capacitor design, which means you can only input signals lower than the clock frequency used for switching the caps. I had a look for continuous-time FPAAs but couldn't find any. My goal is simply to make a guitar FX pedal with them, as they can alter gain, perform filtering such band-pass etc. Potentially I could see it having lower latency than DSP, if anyone knows more about that, I'd be very curious.
- OnACoffeeBreak 12y ago
  This may be completely not what you're looking for, but take a look at Cypress' PSOC devices. They have an interesting mix of analog and digital programmable blocks.
- alecdibble 12y ago
  If you are interested, I did some research on extremely fast, lower power, and low noise filtering using FPGAs or CPLDs.
  - reportingsjr 12y ago
    I am interested if you are willing to share!
    - alecdibble 12y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592292 Link to my reply. :)
  - deutronium 12y ago
    Sure, that sounds cool! (I've got a cheap FPGA dev board that's got an ADC/DAC on, that I wouldn't mind putting to good use)
    - alecdibble 12y ago
mdturnerphys 12y ago
Two of the sub-comments here mention them, but anyone interested in this sort of chip should check out Cypress's PSoC line.
Animats 12y ago
You don't get that much analog per chip yet. See http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/DS231000-U001.pdf http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/DS231000-U001.pdf Basically, it's four op amps, plus programmable circuitry for all the accessory stuff needed to build most of the things you can do with four op amps. This is neat, but four op amps isn't much analog computation. Here's the block diagram of a classic, very successful analog control system: the F-16's original stability control system: http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png So this isn't for analog computation, it's for front-ending digital systems where you need to do some filtering at a faster speed than a DSP approach can handle. The Cypress PSoC line seems to be a whole ARM processor with a little analog stuff added.

78 points by pointfree 12y ago

Fast forward 6 years and it looks like they are available from a company called Anadigm ( http://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp http://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp ). This sounds like it could be a great fit for Software Defined Radio.

mikepurvis 12y ago
Dev kit is $200. Chip is listed at Arrow for ~$10, but out of stock. I wonder if you could do some interesting analog audio stuff, like building low part count multi-speaker crossover networks, etc. Then again, for $10 apiece, it probably still makes way more sense to just put a cortex or something on there and do it all digitally.
- _-__--- 12y ago
  You could market it to the analog-or-nothing crowd in the audio community. Decreasing production time of "boutique" analog clone effects pedals could make you some cash.
  - mikepurvis 12y ago
    That would be neat— a reconfigurable effect pedal that you could download and install new patches for. The _real_ trick would be providing the option to route the signals out of this thing and through vacuum tube stages, so you're not stuck trying to build a decent overdrive or compressor with silicon-only components.
- deutronium 12y ago
  You can buy the chips directly from them, for around ~$10 each.
imrehg 12y ago
They sell the dev kit for the current AN231E04 part, but at least the Asian distributor does not stock it (only back order), and over $200, but at least it is available from 1. If I'd just want the part, it comes in 1000 increments... I'd have some more ideas for lab instruments, but under these circumstances it cannot really be used for product development, sadly
- pointfree 12y ago
  I just found that the part is available through distributors on alibaba one of them even selling in min orders of 1. http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_en&CatId=&SearchText=AN231E04 http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_...
  - pinkyand 12y ago
    With all the fake electronic parts coming from china, are those companies a trustworthy long term source for such companies ? Not sure. One common advice is to buy from authorized sources, and looking through octopart[1], arrow is the only distributor of anadgim, with 1000 units minimum quantities. [1]http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=anadigm&sortby=avg_price%20asc&start=0&limit=10 http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=anadigm&sortby=avg_price%...

reisgabrieljoao 12y ago

Rough estimates suggest there are around 3,000 analog engineers in the world That's the real order of magnitude of the number of analog engineers?

otoburb 12y ago
Analog designer experience and skills are akin to "black magic", at least as whispered in the halls of electrical engineering schools 15 years ago. Analog is just devilishly harder when compared to digital IC design; forget about hysteresis curve cutoffs and resulting 'clean' abstractions of 0 and 1.
pjc50 12y ago
Analog silicon designers? Maybe, although it may be underestimating the number outside the West. It's much less prevalent than digital logic, much harder, and slower moving industry as it doesn't benefit from Moore's law in the same way.
- swamp40 12y ago
  I don't think they are talking about silicon designers. The article quotes the professor as hoping FPAA's will allow "a wide range of less-skilled users to try out sophisticated, low-power (analog) techniques". In other words, typical device-level design engineers.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Right, that's his target market, not his existing analog engineer population.
swamp40 12y ago
Very few people use analog signal processing techniques these days. It used to be common up until about 10-15 years ago, but then DSP's came along. Now, you take a signal, buffer it by the minimuum amount necessary to get it into the DSP, and call it a day. The best case is, you don't touch the signal at all, because any caps, filters, op amps can all distort the original signal. You can do it all digitally, and it's much easier to modify on the fly if your technique isn't working well. Boards and boards full of touchy analog electronics have been replaced by a single DSP. And not many people are looking back.

drone 12y ago

Too bad the market is still tough for low-volume FPAA's (vs. FPGA's). A product I was working on last year desperately needed FPAA's in low volumes (think 1k-2k MOQ), and was shelved largely because the lack of market availability. The design was changed to reflect the lack of availability of a low-volume FPAA at a reasonable price point, but this drove the feature set down and the price up until the product was shelved. Until they make them as easily available and as low-cost and many comparable FPGAs, it's going to be hard to design niche-market products around them.

TTPrograms 12y ago
What's the difference between a FPAA and the programmable analog blocks on products like Cypress' PSOC? Those chips are pretty common.
- drone 12y ago
  In our experience, the primary issues was the available number of analog I/Os, we were doing large-scale matrix-like switching between analog sources. That is to say, the PSoCs contained a small number of analog I/Os that could be routed relative to a "dedicated" FPAA.

blt 12y ago

I wonder if you could use it to build a synthesizer. That would be amazing - a modular analog synthesizer on a chip.

boomlinde 12y ago
I believe I read a while that they demonstrated it in a synthesizer application at a music expo, and I've heard rumors that they are already used in some commercial analog synthesizers.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Audio-synthesis has been using these kinds of technologies for decades. Its not unusual for synth/audio-processor manufacturers to make their own custom ASIC's, FPGA's, even small-quantity chipfab runs, to provide their IP to the customer. Synthesis is very promiscuous in this regard; you can make sound with a surprising number of things in the universe.
  - boomlinde 12y ago
    I well aware of the prevalence of the technologies you list in the synthesizer industry, but custom ASICs or FPGAs are quite obviously not the same thing as FPAA.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      If there's a way, the synth nerds will use it.

kens 12y ago

This article is from 2008. Is there any particular reason its here?

pistle 12y ago
This. I was about to bring up the Anadigm source and then saw the date. Not sure why this is news since there are products in the market and demand scale has not surfaced to help ramp up the supply availability and product variations that could make it a healthy market.
mng2 12y ago
I was expecting this to be about Silego products since that's what was featured in a recent newsletter. All of these parts seem pretty niche though.

deutronium 12y ago

I recently bought some FPAAs from Anadigm, specifically the 3.3V version: AN231E04-E2-QFNSP Interestingly they use a switched-capacitor design, which means you can only input signals lower than the clock frequency used for switching the caps. I had a look for continuous-time FPAAs but couldn't find any. My goal is simply to make a guitar FX pedal with them, as they can alter gain, perform filtering such band-pass etc. Potentially I could see it having lower latency than DSP, if anyone knows more about that, I'd be very curious.

OnACoffeeBreak 12y ago
This may be completely not what you're looking for, but take a look at Cypress' PSOC devices. They have an interesting mix of analog and digital programmable blocks.
alecdibble 12y ago
If you are interested, I did some research on extremely fast, lower power, and low noise filtering using FPGAs or CPLDs.
- reportingsjr 12y ago
  I am interested if you are willing to share!
  - alecdibble 12y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8592292 Link to my reply. :)
- deutronium 12y ago
  Sure, that sounds cool! (I've got a cheap FPGA dev board that's got an ADC/DAC on, that I wouldn't mind putting to good use)
  - alecdibble 12y ago

mdturnerphys 12y ago

Two of the sub-comments here mention them, but anyone interested in this sort of chip should check out Cypress's PSoC line.

Animats 12y ago

You don't get that much analog per chip yet. See http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/DS231000-U001.pdf http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/DS231000-U001.pdf Basically, it's four op amps, plus programmable circuitry for all the accessory stuff needed to build most of the things you can do with four op amps. This is neat, but four op amps isn't much analog computation. Here's the block diagram of a classic, very successful analog control system: the F-16's original stability control system: http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png So this isn't for analog computation, it's for front-ending digital systems where you need to do some filtering at a faster speed than a DSP approach can handle. The Cypress PSoC line seems to be a whole ARM processor with a little analog stuff added.