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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 Boards and boards full of touchy analog electronics have been replaced by a single DSP.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.
- agoetz 12y ago
  Signal conditioning is still an important part of EE design. Not all signals are TTL level and unipolar. For example, this appnote[0] uses a Delta-Sigma converter to digitize a load cell, with the ability to "detect one sheet of copier paper dropped on a stack of 20 reams". In order to do this, it relies on an intrumentation amplifier and custom correlated-double sampling to get a measurement accurate to 200,000 counts. And even if your input signal can be directly input to your ADC, you'll still need an analog anti-aliasing filter. Signal conditioning is an important part of signal processing that has to happen in the analog domain. [0] http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an96fa.pdf http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an96fa.pdf
  - swamp40 12y ago
    I agree that we haven't yet eliminated all analog conditioning. Your example however, doesn't really bolster your point. Delta-Sigma modulation is a digital signal processing technique. That particular chip is also using a digital FIR filters to reduce noise.
- pkaye 12y ago
  You still need analog engineers for SoC chip design including voltage regulators and detectors, PLL and clock generation, IO pads.

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.

agoetz 12y ago
Signal conditioning is still an important part of EE design. Not all signals are TTL level and unipolar. For example, this appnote[0] uses a Delta-Sigma converter to digitize a load cell, with the ability to "detect one sheet of copier paper dropped on a stack of 20 reams". In order to do this, it relies on an intrumentation amplifier and custom correlated-double sampling to get a measurement accurate to 200,000 counts. And even if your input signal can be directly input to your ADC, you'll still need an analog anti-aliasing filter. Signal conditioning is an important part of signal processing that has to happen in the analog domain. [0] http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an96fa.pdf http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an96fa.pdf
- swamp40 12y ago
  I agree that we haven't yet eliminated all analog conditioning. Your example however, doesn't really bolster your point. Delta-Sigma modulation is a digital signal processing technique. That particular chip is also using a digital FIR filters to reduce noise.
pkaye 12y ago
You still need analog engineers for SoC chip design including voltage regulators and detectors, PLL and clock generation, IO pads.