The world is going analog. And so am I.
As digital signals get faster, successful characterization and debug requires an understanding of the analog nature of these signals.
Signal-integrity killers such as reflections and cross-talk have analog qualities. Eye-closure impairments such as jitter and noise require analyzing analog signals. Ground bounce must be debugged by characterizing the analog properties of return current paths.
In addition to helping me better understand circuit behavior, I am learning that seeing things through an analog lens also helps me analyze life situations.
When I was younger, everything was digital. If you did anything bad, it was obvious that you should go straight to jail and stay there forever. If you were homeless, you were clearly too lazy to get a job. If our government made a policy, it was always correct. To me there were only two ways to approach any situation: a right way and a wrong way.
Today, as I look at most life situations, I see their analog nature. Like ringing and overshoot/undershoot on a “digital” signal, I see that not everybody is all hi/good or all lo/bad. When analyzing the complex interaction of loop BW and peaking on CDR performance, I also notice there are different perspectives to public policy. Eye closure is caused by myriad signal-integrity effects; similarly, there is no simple root cause or single fix for global economic woes.
Let’s talk: How have you applied engineering concepts to your daily life? Or vice versa?
O. Laney commented:
This is an analog world in which digital plays a bit part.
President Don commented:
As they say, the proof is in the pudding, if the world was not analog we would not have A/D and D/A converters. Digital is only used for transmission of Analog from one place to another with less noise. But it's the accuracy of the conversion process that bothers me.
Andy T commented:
Being an international forum, just be glad the letters you are typing are not going from right to left, or are in columns.
OLD_CURMUDGEON commented:
WHY do these forums for readers' responses appear inverted (newest first to oldest)? Do we read books, newspapers, etc. from the last sentence to the first? I think not! Or, is this a plot by the digital editors at this publication?
rameshupadhya dr. commented:
Nature is complex analog and one of our approach to it can be splitting it through simplistic bi-state which must be conceded better done,as of present, by digital means.Therefore the existence and its image cannot be conflicting or made contradictory looking at only today's perspective.Chances are all that exist in nature, may not necessarily require additional concepts of digital in future as indicated by some of the recent researches.Hence both will continue..
Victor commented:
The world has always been analog, and will be forever, and so am I :-)
(remember the EDN ads in the 1980, with the rose displayed?)
Brad Wood commented:
What few grasp: the essential characteristic of the digital domain, as Bruno Putzeys has succinctly expressed, is that it is the symbol domain. How it is realized in hardware is secondary, if one can compute on and unambiguously store and retrieve the symbols.
The conflation in particular of "digital" and "switching" is particularly misleading.
Yu Seddit commented:
The worls is going binary, and so am 1.
Andy T commented:
@Kyle B - oops, I see there are two ways to read that one. Not "stupid-designers", but designers' "stupid-mistakes" as intended context
J. Jack Flash commented:
The initial article was ridiculous -- anyone who hasn't advanced past black/white or good/bad should still be wearing diapers and eating strained food. The comments are what's really inetresting, and gives me hope for a well engineered world in which most things work 99.99% of the time. Good Show!
Kyle B commented:
Whoa Andy - dude....
Andy T commented:
Only a software person would dismiss digital as ones and zeroes - it never was - EVER. Fail to terminate a fast rising TTL edged backplane trace and you're toast. Then there was the ground bounce problem with fast TTL logic, where there were proponents of moving power and ground to the center pins, instead of keeping TTL's diagonals. Even the lowly 1's and 0's switch could wreak havoc with bounce and required some form of filtering. Game ports on computers got clever with RC charging and counters to determine pot positions - Wozniak's DIGITAL design approaches were among the most clever to wring out every penny of cost.
No Jit, I think you've accidentally disclosed to us that you were a software or firmware guy in your younger days. You were never that young to have missed out the fact that ALL of the signal integrity issues you say you lose sleep over were present in spades 30 years ago, and from which I made a lot of O.T. money fixing stupid "digital" TTL designers' mistakes as a manufacturability engineer - including crosstalk, ground bounce, hot insertion, and reflections.
Randal commented:
Sometimes a binary approach to situations is beneficial: something either requires you to act, or it doesn't. Even in analogue electronics, you test something and it passes the test or it doesn't.
Rezz commented:
I thought the economic system was like a PLL with negative feedback that generated a nice and sustainable sinewave with highs and lows, now I discover it is an unstable system with positive feedback running to saturation. Constant 3% growing is exponential growing and it just can't work. Economists should study analog electronics.
Al Grasso commented:
I trained as an analog engineer then half way through my careear everything went digital. Digital this, digital that. But upon reflections Maxwell's four equations are still analogue. And the Curl of H equal little I is always paramount in my life and observations of nature. As a semiconductor man even when I look at those ugly electric pylons crossing beautiful fields the Curl of H makes them even more beautiful.
William Ketel commented:
The fact is still true, which is that actions are either right or wrong. Also true is that the amount of harm done by wrong actions varies widely, which does not change the fact of an act being wrong, it only affects the damage done. Of course, in the real world all variables are analog, but recall that things are quantized as well, and so a lot of analog is observed in a quantized manner. That does not affect what it is, but only how we see it.
Henri Suyderhoud commented:
"Digital" is something BY DEFINITION. A digital representation of a quantity is made up of basic analog signals that exceed or don't exceed a certai threshold, below which we call it "zero", and above which we call it "one". We can address an awful lot of problems by using this artificial dichotomy. Ultimately in the communications business, all signals are in some way quantized. And how this is done differentiates analog from digital. 4gm6j
Alan commented:
The world has always been analogue...digital is just a simplistic and inaccurate way of describing it....sometimes good enough, sometimes not so good.
mj commented:
Wisdom is knowing when to take the Digital approach or the Analog approach while solving problems. We need both. We need better study of Decision processes and execution techniques such as optimization, hybridization, competetive path integration etc.
Baldrick commented:
Your premise is the digital has only two states 1 & 0, well that needn’t be the case.
Fuzzy logic is a system that allows the digital world to have a degree of compliance with either state. So just as the problems of the world are not 1 or 0, neither is the digital world.
IC Jens commented:
Jit Lim is wrong about one thing, there is a simple solution to the worlds economic woes. Its called Market America, and that companies pay system and how it is structured.
Bnoffsi commented:
This is one of the reasons I feel some instruction in probability and statistics is essential to a higher education; most issues in the world are analog (across a continuous range) not Boolean (1 or 0).
Freddy Krueger commented:
Hmmmm, an axe. That may hold a solution to our political ineptness. Hadn't thought of that one before. Chop, chop, chop, chop....... Kind of a digital format too.
Scott H. commented:
Solving problems in life and engineering are like chopping down a tree with an ax--hardly ever done in one fell swoop. One must keep hacking away. Some trees fall down with a few hits while others require a prolonged effort.
