In this blog post, we will take a look at why analog circuit design has regained attention and become important in an era where digital technology has become commonplace.
Recently, the terms electronic and digital products have been used interchangeably. Until the early 1990s, most of the signals used inside electronic products were analog, with values that continuously varied within a certain range, rather than digital, with only 0s and 1s. However, as digital electronic products began to be developed one after another in the mid-1990s, analog electronic products gradually disappeared in the 2000s as they lost their competitiveness to digital products. As a result, there is no need to distinguish between analog electronic products and digital products, and the terms are used interchangeably.
However, if analog circuit design is becoming important again these days, most people will be wondering why analog technology is needed now that digital electronics have become commonplace. In fact, analog circuit design plays an essential role in the development of electronic products these days. In particular, the importance of analog technology is becoming increasingly apparent in areas that require continuous real-world signals, which are limited by digital signal processing alone. For example, continuous data such as human voice, touch input, and environmental changes such as temperature and humidity are often difficult to simply convert into digital signals. To process such data, an analog method that cannot be completely replaced by digital signals is required. So why is analog technology important in the digital age?
Let’s take the example of the mobile phones we use in our daily lives. There are two ways to enter a phone number on a mobile phone. If the phone has a touch screen, you can press the keypad that appears on the screen, and if the phone has key buttons, you can press the corresponding key to enter the number. At this time, various commands that we enter on the phone, including touch actions, are converted into 0 and 1. However, our hand movements and voice commands are analog signals that change continuously. To convert these signals into digital signals and interpret them, analog circuits are needed. Analog circuits are a key technology that helps us process these continuous signals with precision.
In addition, recently, as various electronic devices require complex functions, designs that combine analog and digital circuits more closely are required. For example, when using a camera on a smartphone, the digital signal processing circuit is responsible for storing the image digitally, but an analog circuit is used in the initial process of converting light into an electrical signal. As such, modern electronic devices use a combination of analog and digital technologies in many areas.
Then, why is analog processing technology especially important? For example, when using a touch screen, users will feel very uncomfortable if the device does not respond exactly as intended. The more precise the technology is for accurately interpreting analog signals and converting them into digital signals, the more naturally users can give commands to the device. These interfaces allow users to interact with electronic devices more intuitively, and the importance of analog circuit design is also increasing.
How is this analog processing technology implemented inside electronic products? If you look inside an electronic product, you will see a complex arrangement of chips of various sizes and shapes. These chips are mostly composed of resistors, inductors (coils), capacitors, and transistors. The resistor limits the current flow to lower the voltage, the inductor blocks the current change, the capacitor stores the charge, and the transistor controls the current flow according to the voltage. The combination and arrangement of these four elements creates a circuit that performs a specific function, and the process of designing this circuit is called analog circuit design.
One of the key elements in analog circuit design is the operating speed and power consumption of the chip. In particular, the clock frequency of high-speed chips such as CPUs has recently played an important role, as a higher clock frequency allows more calculations to be processed. Along with this, various design methods are being studied to reduce power consumption. For example, in the case of mobile devices where battery consumption is important, power efficiency is a more important consideration in analog circuit design. As the process gets smaller, that is, as the transistor gets smaller, power consumption decreases, but the manufacturing cost increases, so a variety of trade-offs must be made at the design stage.
Systems that utilize the advantages of both digital and analog signals will be in greater demand in the future. For example, analog circuit design is essential for the signal processing of sensors in autonomous vehicles and medical devices, which must transmit human senses to the device as accurately as possible. Furthermore, in order to realize technology that controls devices with hand gestures or eye movements, as shown in the movie, an analog circuit design that can accurately recognize human fine movements is essential.
Analog technology, which converts commands given by users into digital signals and enables digital products to understand the commands, is becoming increasingly important along with the development of digital electronic products. The development of analog circuit design technology that connects digital devices to the real world is an area that is expected to grow even more in the future.
