Page 49 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Analog Design Productivity and the Challenge of Creating Future Generations of Analog Engineers

'80 '85 '90 '91
MOS Digital 60.0 63.9 75.3 74.8
Figure 4-2.
Digital-Analog Bipolar Digital 14.1 15.3 9.2 8.5
Percentage Ratio Total of Digital 74.1 79.2 84.5 83.3
(MITI). Linear 25.9 20.8 15.5 16.7
Grand Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

To summarize those discussions, we could categorized the problems in
1
to the following three major classes;
First, because of many people cannot understand that analog circuits
technologies are not out of date but they really a key to develop digital
technologies, the number of students who want to learn analog circuits
technologies are has been decreasing year by year. Even student who
willingly study analog circuits tends to prefer computer simulation rather
than experiments, so they lose a sensitivity to the real world. Accordingly
this lead the results that only a very few number of universities in Japan
still publish technical papers in the field of analog circuits.
Secondly, in the industries, although the importance of the analog
circuits technologies are aware, two things make the number of analog
circuits engineer decreased: increasing production of digital hardware
system need to increase digital circuits engineers, and analog engineers
easily understand digital technologies.
Third, while CAD makes design of digital system very popular, design
of analog circuits are still difficult, it requires still expert's skill. It has
very insufficient productivity. Besides it takes a long time to educate
engineers to be an analog circuits expert. Finally many factories tend to
change their main productions from analog to digital systems.
Analog circuits, however, have many advantages over digital technolo-
gies: very high functional densities for the same chip size, high speed
abilities and high potentials.
So we must make a effort to increase the number of analog engineer
and to hand analog circuits technologies down to next generations.

Analog Design Productivity

CAD (Computer Aided Design, but some peoples think it as Computer
Automated Design) has been widely adopted in the design of digital inte-
grated circuits. Computers can do everything from logic synthesis to
mask pattern generation, taking the place of average design engineers,
only if they got functional specification of the system written in some
high level descriptive language. Meanwhile analog circuits CAD also
become in great request according to the rise of several novel technolo-
gies such as personal communication system, multimedia and so on,
because we have insufficient number of analog circuits design engineers

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