by Max Maxfield
I’m a digital logic designer by trade. In an ever-changing and increasingly unreliable world, I find the certainty of Boolean equations to be extremely reassuring. You know where you are with a Karnaugh map, you can trust a De Morgan transformation, and you can gratify your desire for single-bit transitions with a Gray code. By comparison, I find the wibbly-wobbly nature of analog electronics to be somewhat disconcerting, which is unfortunate because there’s so much of it about these days.
One of the funny things is that “analog” was supposed to be the stuff of yesteryear. When I was coming up in electronics, digital functions were expensive in terms of transistors, and transistors were expensive in terms of cold, hard cash. That’s one of the reasons why analog computers hung on for decades after their digital counterparts first arrived on the scene. It was possible to implement analog signal processing (ASP) functions using a handful of transistors (or vacuum tubes) that would have required hundreds or even thousands of transistors to be realized as digital signal processing (DSP) equivalents. Even more demeaning (to a digital engineer) was the fact that many analog operations functioned faster and consumed lower power than did their digital counterparts.