Page 38 - Analog Circuit Design Art, Science, and Personalities

Jim Williams

Figure 4-2.
Is this the fate of
oscilloscopes
whose innards
are controlled by
knobs instead of
microchips?

Jack Kilby built his IC in 1958. By the middle 1960s, RTL and DTL were in
common use.
While almost everyone agreed that digital approximations weren’t as elegant as
“the real thing,” they were becoming eminently workable, increasingly inexpensive,
and physically more compactable. With their computing business slipping away,
the analog people pulled their amplifiers out of computers, threw the racks away,
and scurried into the measurement and control business. (For a nostalgic, if not
tearful, look at analog computers at the zenith of their glory, read A Palimpsest on
the Electronic Analog Art, edited by Henry M. Paynter.)
If you have read thoughtfully to this point, it should be obvious that analog is
not dead, rather just badly shaken and overshadowed in the aftermath of the war.
Although measurement and control are certainly still around, the really glamorous
and publicized territory has been staked out by the digital troops for some time.
Hard-core guerrilla resistance to this state of affairs, while heroic, is guaranteed
suicide. To stay alive, and even prosper, calls for skillful bargaining based on thor-
ough analysis of the competition’s need.
The understanding that analog is not dead lies in two key observations. First, to
do any useful work, the digital world requires information to perform its operations
upon. The information must come from something loosely referred to as “the real
world.” Deleting quantum mechanics, the “real world” is analog. Supermarket
scales, automobile engines, blast furnaces, and the human body are all examples of
systems that furnish the analog information that the silicon abacus requires to jus-

19