Although the vast majority of people in the embedded and IoT industries are bouncing back and forth and jumping up and down singing the praises of digital systems and digital signal processing (DSP), it's the topics of analog systems and analog signal processing (ASP) that have been much on (what I laughingly call) my mind…
I was just chatting with Mark Lippett, who is CEO at the British chip company XMOS. Mark was telling me that they recently announced the launch of their XVF3610 and XVF3615 voice processors. These little beauties will power the next generation of high-performance two-microphone voice interfaces for wireless speakers, TVs, set-top boxes, smart home appliances,…
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 o