August 16, 1999
August 16, 1999
The Future of Digital is Analogby Robbie McAdam
Norwood, Mass.--The claims made by many market observers only a few years ago that the demise of the analog market was imminent have turned out to be, to put it mildly, exaggerated. In fact, the analog business has never been stronger, and valuations for many analog IC manufacturers today match or exceed their digital counterparts. And with demand growth at the high end of the analog market exceeding 25 percent per year--according to the market research firm Gartner Group/Dataquest--the future looks bright.
The fact that analog's popularity is rising just when the flood of new digital products is reaching historic highs is not a coincidence. With digital technology now ubiquitous--from cellular telephones, to the Internet, to home entertainment, to kitchen appliances and white goods--the demand for the analog technology that controls and defines the user interface has proliferated as well. People want a better online experience, a better visual experience, a better audio experience. They want improved reliability, faster downloads, truer sound, more realistic pictures, longer battery life, more power, greater range, and quieter operation. They wouldn't want these things if the digital revolution hadn't created the expectation. But they wouldn't get them if the analog technology had not kept pace. Expectations will continue to rise and analog technology is growing to meet the challenge.
What's true for markets, is true for products: the higher the digital content, the greater the need for analog value. Digital handsets have more analog chips in them than do analog handsets. Pentium II and Pentium III microprocessors require higher value analog chips for thermal and power management than do previous generation microprocessors. The addition of DVD-quality audio capabilities to PC motherboards and to notebooks has led to the proportionately higher concentration of analog chips now populating those boards. Previous generations of computers didn't use these high-performance analog chips, not because this class of analog chips wasn't available (it was), but because the industry focus was function, not form and quality.
Given current trends, what does this analog-to-digital relationship mean for the future of the analog chip industry? For one thing, it means that Moore's Law (i.e., processor speed/capacity increased more than 30 percent each year without an increase in price) has a multiplier effect on analog components--and it may not be linear. In other words, as the computing power of digital chips increases every year, the analog processing power required to support it will grow at an even greater rate.
Certainly, that's what the evidence to date suggests. No matter which aspects of performance one considers, the trends in analog performance are relentlessly towards faster, smaller, more accurate, lower power, more integrated, and cheaper.
One brief example: In the space of two years between 1997 and 1999, the performance level of high-speed 12-bit ADCs, as measured by the ratio of throughput speed to power consumption, has improved by 66 percent, from 35 milli Watts per Mega Symbols [that is ... Sample] per Second (MSPS) to 10 milli Watts per MSPS.It may seem that this level of reduction is not all that remarkable, but when one considers the difficulty of achieving these magnitudes of performance improvements in the analog domain (remember: analog doesn't scale), they are indeed remarkable. But they are simply the performance levels analog vendors need to constantly achieve if they hope to keep up with the rising digital tide.
Many of the tough challenges OEMs face are related to analog circuitry. A major barrier to LCD flat panel adoption, for example, has been the availability of economical 140MSPS drivers that enable connection to legacy systems lacking digital outputs. One of the cost drivers in DSL deployment is the modem port density, i.e., the number of modem ports that can fit in a box. The problem is heat dissipation, 60 percent of which is caused by the analog components, primarily line drivers. The high temperatures generated limited the number of modems a given system could support. Through advancements in high-performance analog technology, we can now produce line drivers with dramatically lower heat dissipation that enable modem designers to pack more ports into a single box. The end result is more modems per box and thus fewer boxes needed to be deployed to serve a given customer base.
The lesson is clear: not only modem vendors but makers of all types of digitally based products will increasingly need to bring to bear analog design expertise in order to successfully differentiate their products. This won't be easy. Most manufacturers have neglected their analog skills in recent years while they focused on digital. Rather than relearn these skills overnight, most equipment makers will seek out analog partners as their design resource.
They should do so with care.
Analog design competency--especially in the high-performance arena--is increasingly rare. It requires both intense specialization and heavy investment in research and development. One area of investment is in a portfolio of high-performance analog "cores"--i.e., converters, amplifiers, power management and hardware monitoring devices--that can be leveraged into multiple applications, either as standalone products or as integrated application-optimized solutions. Both technical skills (e.g., data converter and amplifier design) and system skills (e.g., functional partitions and tradeoffs) are required to develop useful products for leading edge applications. Before signing up, companies should ask prospective partners about particular areas of leadership. What kind of high-performance cores do they offer? What kind of investments are they making for future developments? How experienced are their design groups?
Finally--and this is most important--how intimate is their understanding of the digital, as well as the analog domain? Can your partner lay claim to digital signal processing leadership, in addition to its analog expertise? The fact is that those companies with a complete, integrated portfolio of both digital signal processing and analog technology are best poised for leadership.
Robbie McAdam is vice president and general manager of the Standard Linear Products division of Analog Devices Inc., Norwood, Mass.
Copyright © 2000 Cahners Business Information, A Division of Reed Elsevier, Inc.
