A massive convergence is taking place between analog and digital. Increasingly sophisticated analog peripherals are finding their way into microcontrollers and other logic devices as designers solve the problems associated with placing analog and digital circuitry on the same die. For example, one high-end 8-bit microcontroller features high-performance digital capability along with a full suite of analog peripherals, such as low-voltage detect, voltage reference and 10 channels of 12-bit A/D conversion.
This level of integration raises the bar for standalone analog products. It is difficult, for example, to justify developing an 8-bit successive-approximation register A/D now that these are ubiquitous in low-end microcontrollers.
At the same time, digital expertise is finding its way into "purely analog" products. Precision adjustment of analog components such as op amps, traditionally done by laser trimming thin-film resistors, is giving way to E2PROM-based trimming systems in some applications. This points the way to a new generation of analog products that lets the user change parameters such as gain, offset and drift to fine-tune the circuitry to the application.
Carrying this idea one step further, a number of field-programmable analog arrays and reconfigurable filters have hit the market in the past year. Programmability is a primary attraction of these digital-analog hybrids. And digital attributes integrated onto traditional analog circuits may shorten OEM time-to-market as programmable analog solutions become more cost-effective.
Given the prominence of PCs and the Internet, digital design is seen as the wave of the future and colleges are graduating fewer and fewer analog-savvy engineers. This imbalance places extraordinary pressure on OEMs as the analog design function becomes a bigger bottleneck in the race to market.
Many digital designers with primary responsibility for the microcontroller are being asked to specify the standalone analog components that interface with the central digital core. They may be less familiar with the specifications and considerations of analog components and might welcome some assistance.
To help educate digital engineers on designing with analog, some suppliers are introducing software tools and low-cost development systems such as one tool,downloadable from the Web, that automates anti-aliasing filter design. Digital suppliers see customer education as key to market acceptance when they expand into the analog domain. Hopefully both analog and digital engineers will benefit as a result.
Rich Simoncic is vice president of the Microperipheral Products Division at Microchip Technology Inc., based in Chandler, Ariz.
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