Anablog

Sep 19 2006 10:47AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |
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GTronix is bringing back the analog computer.  They use EEPROM technology to selectively charge up a floating gate.  This can be made into a multiplier and it can be done with a lot fewer transistors that a DSP.  It is also not a sampled-data system like all the digital implementations.  Now I was pretty interested in this since I, like Bob Pease, like analog computers.  GTronix told me about how once they have a multiplier it was easy to do an FFT.  Then Hans Klien, their VP of Engineering pointed out that the FFT was just a subset, and an easy case of doing a discrete cosine transform.  That got my ears snapped up to attention.  See, I heard that DCT term years ago when talking about MP3 compression.  It is also a basis of a lot of video compression.  So I asked: “You mean to tell me one day you could transform audio and video in and out of a compressed format?”  The smiles of pride told the tale.  I think this is great.  My buddy Martin DeLateur told me that in his mind the big deal will be temperature.  These floating gates will change around significantly over temperature.  I asked Tom Darbonne, GTronix VP of marketing about this and he agreed that temperature was an issue and said that they had circuitry in place to compensate for this very phenomena.  Best yet, the whole analog shebang will run on a standard CMOS fab process as long as it can do EEPROMs, which is most of them.  Wohoo, analog computers are back.  Do you get it?  Sure with so few transistors doing the signal processing there will be a nice cost improvement but the really big deal is that those fewer transistors need so much less power.  Digital Power people brag about quiescent currents of “only” 7 mA but any handheld device likes power consumption more like 50 uA.  GTronix spun a lot of this technology out of those ramblin’ wrecks at Georgia Tech.  They also have an HQ here in Silicon Valley.  Spock from Star Trek has pointed out:  “Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.  In this case, I should think ‘interesting’ would suffice.”  Well in this case the technology is certainly fascinating.  I can see why GTronix was the first start up I have been around that was not hinting about needing “partners” and getting VC interest whipped up.  No, they have all the money they need from big-time VC firms.  They are initially targeting sensor signal conditioning and pre-processing in cell phones and other portables.  There is still a lot that can go wrong but I sure wish them all well.  Their press release says:

The APT® technology comprises a programmable analog structure and architecture that intelligently can process real-world data, such as acoustic, visual, positioning and haptic stimuli.Covered by more than a dozen patents, the APT technology leverages a unique combination of three elements: proprietary analog algorithms; a programmable floating gate transistor structure; and a unique circuit design technique for creating signal processing functions.

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