One side-championed by Lew Counts, vice president for advanced linear products at Analog Devices, and Ted Tewksbury, signal processing director at Maxim Integrated Products-talked about analog as if it were only a specialty skill. Tewksbury, in fact, came close to suggesting that ADI and Maxim were the only companies that cared about analog anymore (an assertion that Linear Technology Corp. and maybe National Semiconductor might find objectionable).

But the champions of CMOS-Hitachi and Philips on the panel, Texas Instruments in the morning's keynote-came off as huge manufacturing machines. Their vision of analog was the "mixed-signal" version, in which digital logic performs analog functions-and saves on costs. While the dc-accuracy of a sigma-delta converter might be questionable, its 20,000 transistors are a lot cheaper to manufacture in CMOS than a 32-transistor bipolar device with laser-trimmed resistor ladders.

These technologists are closer to agreement than their public bickering suggested. Analog Devices is making inroads into direct-conversion radio architectures (for GSM phones), a technology that absolutely depends on CMOS integration. And even in his depiction of the single-chip cell phone, Texas Instruments vice president Dennis Buss put an asterisk on certain items (like the power amp antenna driver) that would inevitably remain a separate-yes, analog-chip.

But the goading and the name-calling served another function besides entertainment. The evening panels were traditionally the place where lines in the sand were drawn, Barrie Gilbert, the famous ADI designer, reminded me. This was the place, if you remember, where one technologist asserted, "There could never be a monolithic 12-bit DAC." The following year, the Santa Clara division of Analog Devices (then a company called Precision Monolithics) not only produced one, but also etched an "eat your heart out" message into the metal mask.

As TI's Buss pointed out in his plenary talk, scaled CMOS makes it very practical to build flash conversion devices-4096 (or 65,535) parallel comparators on one chip-for capturing data at high-MHz rates. Thus, ISSCC serves not just as a place for semi industry "dinosaurs" to reminisce, but also as a genuine pointer to the future.