Analog signal processing

EE Times has one of those “35 things in the future” and along with some no-brainers like China and Google, number 35 is “The analog shell”. This refers to the fact that you can do complex signal processing in the analog domain and do it with a lot less power than it takes a DSP to do it. I wrote about how National Semiconductor is using this to control noise in microphone amplifiers. There is a local start-up that is really plying the waters of the analog shell. That company is GTronix. What GTronix does is use the EEPROM floating gate technology to make little analog multipliers. Once you have multiplication you can do FFTs or other complex math like the discrete cosine transform used in MP3 and JPEG and other compression schemes. I don’t think GTronix wants to announce what it is working on yet, but I can assure you it is pretty cool and it is smack dab in the middle of the analog shell. Business weenies call ASP average selling price. Well I say it should stand for analog signal processing.