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Are the Glory Days of Analog Engineering Over?
An anonymous reader writes with this article about the future of the analog engineer. Some say technology advancements are obsoleting the need for analog engineers, while others say that good, experienced analog designers will always be needed and currently are in short supply. After years spent encouraging engineering students to focus on software and digital electronics, some people say the day of reckoning appears to be drawing near: Many analog mixed-signal design jobs now stay open longer or are simply going unfilled, say recruiters, with some engineers even unable to retire because they can't find a suitable replacement. On the one hand, some people blame the shift from analog to digital, which produced a generation of engineers who speak the language of code, not circuit schematics. On the other hand, others say that with the advent of systems-on-chip, the easy availability of free circuits, pioneered by companies like TSMC, and software tools to verify designs, there is simply less need for analog designers.
The world is analogue. Someone's going to have to design the analogue front end to your digital system. Even if you have a ready made analogue front end, you still have to understand the analogue world if you ever hope to design high speed digital systems. When it comes to the actual voltage levels on your PCB and signal integrity, the nice clean world of software where you can just expect the hardware to be predictable and just work with no effort goes away, you have to have a little bit of a clue about the analogue side if you want your high speed digital signals to reach their destinations intact. Another example is your (A)DSL line, it might be called "Digital subscriber line" but it required analogue design to get the signal from your modem (and it is a modem - it modulates and demodulates the signal) to the DSLAM in your phone exchange.
You might not need as many analogue engineers as you may have (say) in the 90s, but they'll never go away because the world is analogue, and the analogue world constantly impinges on your digital signals especially once you pass single digit MHz speeds.
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Analog circuits are always going to be faster, more accurate per area of silicon, and less deterministic than digital circuits. They're also always going to be harder to understand than digital circuits for anyone who isn't a wizard. There's less need for analog circuit wizards than there is for digital circuit designers just the same way there's less need for deep embedded software wizards than there is for your garden-variety software engineers. It hurts to say it but technology is advancing to the point where it's less important to get 100% out of our current technology than it is to get 25% out of it in a manner that mere mortals can understand.
There'll always be a place for analog design but it will be confined to an ever-shrinking niche on the cutting edge where, as bogglingly capable as it is, our digital technology just isn't quite up to the task.
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I think it is not over, it's form is changing with time. As we know it will never end just it will adapt or change with it.
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Even if you're doing digital design all day you _need_ an analog background to do a good job. Most of the time analog signals aren't directly input to your microcontroller / DSP... as you need to add protection to your input stage, filter for parasites etc... >1Mhz digital signals can't simply be laid out on a board without thinking of the problems that may arise due to the nearby signals / layout of your transmission lines. Everything on your board is analog and I'm not even mentioning what you should take care of when you'll have to do EMC testing. On a side note I'm very skeptical of the article's quality...
If they let the position go unfilled I guess there wasn't really enough need, ie. not enough profit in it to hire the expertise which is on the market (and there are still plenty of the old guard doing consulting, not cheap obviously) or train someone.
Quick, we need more H-1Bs to suppress wages.
Part of "Digital", the lowest level of digital, is a contract concerning how signalling between transistors occurs. This includes timing, rise and hold times, voltage thresholds and current. I'll include avoidance of race conditions, clock distribution, refresh cycles on DRAM and temperature effects as a side car. These are all design constraints that make sure the 1s and 0s working properly. It's only when you have a 99.99999999% solid digital contract that you can begin the digital side of the design.
All of this digital design is solidly analog and will NEVER go away.
I could make another whole post about the absurdity of traditional "analog" going away. All these mobile devices have some amazing RF design going on from the antenna down to the mixed signal SoC. Analog is everywhere and at the core of every electronic gadget.
And so are the glory days of being an electrical engineer in the West. Or a technician.
Get over it.
Everything analog that had to so with consumer information processing is now digital.
Record player, cassette deck, reel to reel audio, VHS, radio, equalizer, etc.. hell even the power amplifiers can now be switching. All information can be stored as a bit on super cheap supports.
Parts have become commodities, all the hard engineering lifting has been done decades ago.
Automation in the East assures a steady supply of cheap parts. That means no one is willing to pay anyone a reasonable amount to fart around with this stuff professionally.
Sure, you'll always need a core of analog engineers for where the rubber hits the road, but since engineers have piss-poor professional protection, this can all go to the lowest bidder across the world.
Contrast this to let's say a lawyer. Every country has a different legal system. You can't outsource any of this stuff.
And all the people who think you "need" an analog background to design 1MHz microcontroller stuff, that's what the app note is for. "Do this like that".
It just needed to be solved once, then everyone copies it.
You know it's true. I've spoken with EEs with decades of experience who don't even know what a common mode voltage is anymore because they just apply the same recipe over and over.
What's the point of churning out so many EEs these days? I mean except as a way to channel government loan money into university coffers via student debt.
We will need all the analog guys when the machines become sentient and we need to keep them out of our networks
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There's very little need for complicated analog designs anymore, but analog circuits are still and will always be the interface to the real world. ESD hardening, electromagnetic compatibility, antenna design, and very high frequency interfaces are all analog domains. Besides, who's going to milk the audiophiles if there aren't enough analog engineers?
in that every PHB wants the instant gratification of software, along with it's low startup costs (no test equipment), instant duplication and distribution, uniformity etc. They don't understand that some things require multiple revisions to dial in the response, along with applying engineering principles rather than "hacking". In short, everyone wants instant gratification with little investment in time and money. Now let me get back to my vector network analyzer.
In the experimental sciences we make heavy use of analog circuits. We need to be able to take signals scale them, filter them, integrate them, buffer them, all in analog before it reaches our DAC systems. Otherwise a voltage spike will fry your digital portions.
There's another technology that reduces the need for analog engineers: GPU. Three years ago, I demonstrated real-time band-pass filtering on incoming digitized sensor input that previously required a custom $20k signal conditioning unit. Except in the GPU rolloffs could be steeper, and cutoffs could be adjusted through the GUI instead of calling up one of the retired original designers to compute new resistor & cap values.
Just because there is no suitable replacement should not be grounds for an engineer to work forever! Which companies are saying that you arent allowed to retire because of no suitable replacements? Name and shame them!
As an analog enginner our group splits its time between true analog work and high speed custom digital design.
Yes its true that the availability of IP blocks from tsmc and the likes have made it very easy to purchase analog blocks with silicon proven designs that have very low risk and are fairly "cheap" such as PLL's.
However theres always a need for custom tailor made analog blocks that can't be found on the market. This is especially true if you want to be on the cutting edge and can't wait 2 years for the IP vendors to catch up.
The other half of our group simply does high speed digital. We custom lay out logic devices by hand so we can optimize speed/power/area more effectively than the digital folks. Yes its time consuming and expensive (per transistor, its an extremely expensive for the amount of time spent), but when you need speed on critical nets, that's not something verilog RTL can give you effectively.
In the past, the manufacturing processes for analog and digital circuits were so different that they could not be combined on the same chip on a large scale. There were big companies that made digital chips and a host of smaller companies that made analog chips. That changed about ten years ago and analog circuits are now included on SOC designs. That has caused a shift in the industry, as the large SOC manufacturers have absorbed most of the new analog circuit designers who used to go to smaller companies that specialized in analog. The smaller companies are faced with competition for designers and a shrinking niche for their specialized products.
Texas Instruments has $12B in sales and analog is a large (and growing) chunk of that.
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I'll just leave the rest up to all you fine people
I would just like to say a big fat "thank you" to all the corporations who outsourced all our design and manufacturing. It is becoming quite obvious while observing this thread that this was necessary due to the lack of intelligent engineers left in north america.
What happens is that they keep raising the salary of the engineers in question until they decide not to retire.
It is a simple economic problem. How well does it pay?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
What happens is that you get a happy Engineer, and whats wrong with working abit longer, my dad was working until 74 before he started to take it slower.
Welcome to the future! If you mean what I think you mean, then I agree. The "glory days" are gone. There are less analog designs being done, and they are replaced with more complex digital systems. Some of these are better, but none are as elegant as pure analog. I also think the "glory days" of the WWW are also gone. There are simply less (none) HTML only sites being created, and they are getting replaced with..well everything they can cram into your face. Welcome to the future!
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Are the glory days for analog design over? Yes.
Are the days where analog design is necessary over? Nope, nor will they ever be.
That said, I know a good number of who studied electrical and computer engineering who went into software and test engineering after school and never looked back. EE doesn't pay a lot and there's a good deal of demand for people who can knock a simple circuit together AND have a good working knowledge of software that can talk to it.
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This said I think every prospective engineer should consider carefully the reasons to become one. It is advised to do something on top too - like applied business practice or Business Economics as they call it. Seems to be a common practice in Germany these days and I find the idea appealing. Then again I am not sure whether any engineering title will guarantee you a job in the future. I saw today the stats for education in Germany and the number of people finishing off the courses at universities has increased over the years. What has not increased is number of people going secondary paths of education and ending up in industry 'lower' positions. Gosh when I look around in my settlement - there are only few houses where owners are engineers. There is one where there is a civil servant and another one university teacher and 4 households with engineers including mine. The rest of the settlement is owned by technicians doing intelligent work for others sometimes even supervising the floor in small industrial companies. Quite frankly I find them more worthy than those engineers with a title that I have to work with but that is another story.
So if one takes property ownership as a proxy for well done career choices then being an engineer does not mean much. But hell it makes fun if you can assemble things and see them work. There is certain great positivist joy in doing that! The question is: do you need to become an engineer to do these things today? I wonder if that is really true.
Original question was about digital and analogue being put as opposites - tell me then whether doing this stuff is analogue or digital? Surely lots of silicon is being used and a little processed into an actual product. As surely as a lots of digital processing used to control completly automated factory producing those things.
The statistics I meantioned briefly before makes me also think about history. There were times where engineer was a sign of high intelligence and skill. The I got a degree..... And then all these people I work got degrees too..... Now it seems to me the value the engineers before had in society is now attributed to scientists but not even them are at the level an engineer like this was before. This guy had an impact on societies he lived in. Do YOU think that your input is anywhere around this level? Why do we talk about glory then?
Just because there's more digital than a decade ago doesn't mean there's less analog.
Your smartphone contains A LOT of analog:
- RF: Low Noise Amplifiers, mixers, RF filters, RF Power Amplifier
- Baseband: filters, A/D converters, D/A converters
- Power: power management, supply scaling and power gating for digital, DC/DC converters, battery management
- Audio: Codec, Class AB amplifiers, Class D amplifiers.
- Display: high voltage generation, pixel drivers, capacitive sensing circuitry
It's a fascinating world and in my experience it's not getting smaller.
Demand for analog designers has been strong as long as I can remember.
I swear I heard a similar speech on my first day at Tektronix in 1983.
I assumed that was the sentiment of the engineers themselves.
I don't have a lot of contact with people in *this* field, but in other similarly niche fields with very concrete, yet limited demand (e.g. not aligned with the buzzwords deep in the muck where things *must* happen but 99.99% of the ecosystem take it for granted and doesn't want to actually touch it). In those fields, it was once upon a time not a 'given' and thus young blood was actively pushed in. Now it's a 'given' (despite requiring continuous evolution to keep things up), so the only people in the field are mostly retirement eligible people who have not retired. Overwhelmingly, the impression I get is that they are so *passionate* about the work that they can't bear to see it go untended.
Of course, some of those would declare that, but then even after a fluke young person interested in the work does come along, they still can't bring themselves to retire since the work is really simply enjoyable to them.
Personally, the moment I realistically could retire, I'm out. I love my work and all, but I love not working even more.
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As a computer engineer who can't stand analog electronics, I can say with confidence that we'll always need them. Nothing would work with out them. Much of my knowledge is based on analog circuits, and I couldn't do my job without that knowledge.
I hope this article doesn't scare potential EEs away from their degree. It's misleading and poorly researched. Frankly I'm surprised EETimes would run something sensational like that.
You're never going to get rid of analog engineers as long as we use RF and AC.
I hear is a new hot field for analog engineering but the work is slow and steady...
Older, vacuum tube (valve) based equipment is generally much less vulnerable to nuclear EMP than newer solid state equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#Vacuum_tube_versus_solid_state_electronics
Think of it this way: Digital is math, Analog is Physics.
As mentioned before, the world is analog. Obvious things like audio and video interfaces need analog circuits and always will. Our ears, voice, and eyes are all analog. However, in todays circuits the analog content is growing not shrinking. Phones have batteries that need to be carefully managed. The digital circuits need many power supplies that need sophisticated regulation. These are all analog circuits. The wi-fi, bluetooth, cellular, NFC, and other radios are all very analog intensive circuits. There are a multitude of monitoring and control circuits on any modern piece of electronics that are all analog. The USB, HDMI, firewire (old, I know), Thunderbolt, etc. interfaces are all high-speed circuits that need analog drivers, receivers, and clocks that are analog. The CPUs, DSPs, etc all need clean clocks that are generated by PLLs that are analog even if they contain digital elements. Even the digital logic gates themselves are analog. The voltage levels that devine 0s and 1s are very analog. Their accuracy is quantified and defined to work with supply noise, clock jitter, and timing errors. All analog stuff. The digital math only works when these analog problems are reliably solved.
So please, keep saying that the world is digital and analog is going to die. It only provides more job security. We can't hire good analog designers fast enough.
I think it is not over, it's form is changing with time. As we know it will never end just it will adapt or change with it.
It's form is changing with time... I see what you did there.
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Wireless, high speed digital, chip design, and power conversion are areas that currently consume a lot of analog design time.
But the folks doing this need to be much broader than just analog.
Precision, analog only design may be pretty rare these days.
There are some niche markets like high end audio,
but usually analog design includes understanding and adjusting tradeoffs between analog, digital and software.
Analogue design is another subject.
That may be the design process used by Lucus to make job opportunities for car mechanics?
Analog is how information is collected from nature. For most (if not all) digital systems, the device used for actual measurement will have analog sensors. The electrical, then converted to digital, signals are dependent on the analog receptor.
People can always improve on these tools.
I am an analog designer and i crave for the fastest digital inverters because we work on time domain (phase domain) processing on information using vcos and delay lines so old logic that digital is winning because of scaling advantages dont hold no more . The better the time resolution the more accurate our "analogue" ADCs , PLLs, DLLs , IO gets .
A few years ago when there was a concern that not enough analog engineers were being trained to meet demand, lecturers at Georgia Tech and others suggested the use of Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) in order to let students get their hands dirty with real analogue electronics with some of the convenience of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs.) While purists might believe that analog without the mess of breadboards, wire-wraps and soldering isn't analog, it fills a real-world need.
Unfortunately it seems that interest in FPAAs peaked too early-- before the Maker and openhardware movement might have driven up demand and driven down costs.Anadigm does have some products I'd love to see packged as an Arduino shield. Who wouldn't want a pocket Moog Synthesizer?
Yes, but even for quantum processes, you often perform multiple measurements so that you get an _average_ value, and that value need not be quantized. (In other words, states are discrete, but wave functions needn't be.)
So a quantum world is not at odds with an analog world.
Yes computers and internet are important but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The most important engineering currently being done is still analog, like reusable rockets and fusion reactors. These rank slightly higher on the scale of importance to humanity than the guys making internet-connected refrigerators and targeted website ads.
Reminds me a few years ago when some dudes running websites voted "the internet" the most important invention in human history. It's as if they never heard of agriculture, or fire, or electricity, or indoor plumbing, or any number of things that are keeping these idiots alive.
The TV example is a mix of proving his point and a meaningless comparison.
Digital generally has two states: working and not working, and GP is saying that it's often easy for an all digital system to be in the former camp. (Think of an LCD computer display that gets digital inputs; there's almost no noise there.). However, "Digital" TV is really a digital/analog hybrid: you have analog antennas, amplifiers, and filters. Those analog parts are flexible; the digital part is much less so. The analog part can take some noise (snow on an analog TV), but when that noise is passed on to the digital part, things can fall apart. I.e. digital signals are much more sensitive to GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), but that's much less of a problem on an all digital system.
In short, the complicated part is the analog part; if that can give the digital part a good signal, then there are no problems. In other words, it's exactly what the GP said.
As long as analog can still beat digital, its not going away anytime soon. I have designed pure analog circuits to do control and functional logic in some cases because its cheaper, easier to build, and eliminates a programming step than throwing in a micro controller. You don't see it done much these days because people just don't bother considering it as an option.
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Heartily disappointed to find this in the dictionary as a verb.
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On one hand as much as possible gets done in digital domain. On the other hand, what has to stay purely analog keeps getting more and more complicated. Summa summarum there is still as much analog design that needs doing.
Seeing this article, I immediately remembered the book Innovative Linear Circuits by Jim Williams (by EDN, 1985). Though dated it has lots of interesting techniques (much of it I have forgot, but incentive to re-learn this stuff). Here's something mildly amusing,
A quiz of various circuits (and how to make imperfect components function perfectly together), and ratings of correct answers:
Number: Rating
20-25: Circuit designer
15-20: Electrical engineer
10-15: TTL jockey
5-10: Microprocessor scholar
0-5: Computer programmer
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You just need to become a scientist. That's what seems to have happened. In science, where you're measuring the real world, you're by definition on the boundary of analog and digital. Engineering simply seems to have ceded that branch to us. Engineering is digital. Science is analog.
Maybe it's too hard for engineers?
It's a sad state of affairs that our engineers are so disconnected from reality that they forget it.
As usual, an interesting article with a terrible Slashdot title, overplaying the aspect of analog vs digital.
In fact, it's a lot more a matter of discrete vs integrated.
Decades ago, people designed and built digital logic, entire digital computers even, based on discrete (individual) valves or transistors.
Then, we moved to designing them based on many small integrated circuits which performed simple logic functions, like the 7400 series TTL circuits.
And then we moved to highly integrated digital circuits.
I've used micro-processors, field programmable gate arrays and even designed custom ASICs. But outside school, I never used a 7400 chip, much less design an AND gate based on discrete BJT transistors.
It's all digital, but it's different skill sets.
A similar change of skills happens for analog designers.
Some things that 20 years ago were done by a circuit on a board using discrete transistors are now done inside an integrated circuit.
Again, it's all analog but it's different skill sets.
(Some others, have moved from fully analog to mixed signal, digitizing analog signals and then processing them digitally).
Analog skills are still much needed.
Nowadays, the highly integrated digital circuits communicate between themselves at multi-gigabit speeds and our board designs face issues that, 20 years ago, were a concern only for RF analog engineers
But the needed analog skills are changing.
For example, when designing integrated circuits, it's increasingly necessary to be aware of the physical issues that happen at the sub-micron scale.
Being able to design a RF amplifier based on discrete HBT does not necessarily prepare you do design one in a sub-micron integrated circuit.
Some say that good, experienced analog designers will always be needed and currently are in short supply due to what others say technology advancements are obsoleting the need for analog engineers.
Re: "... technology is advancing to the point where it's less important to get 100% out of our current technology than it is to get 25% out of it in a manner that mere mortals can understand."
Take it from a pure digital guy, that comment holds true in the digital world as well. Clock cycles are so cheap that uncountable billions of them are wasted by sloppily designed software. And the excuse invariably is, "well our software is so powerful that it requires a real beast of a computer to run on." Which is almost never true.
Hey, I get it. Companies are optimizing for cost and the computers are cheap and the people are expensive. Just don't pretend that it's the powerful nature of your code that causes it to consume entire computer systems and still runs like crap. The real reason is that you hired 19 year old script kiddies from Asia to program the thing and they translated the program requirements through Babelfish, with all that implies. And that assumes that there ever were documented program requirements.
Sounds like a cow mooing about getting milked. Your udders still sore?
.
A bit more education should be 'cross trained' for digital appreciation of analog, and for some analog engineer appreciation of digital. Real life in the 21st Century needs both.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I'm an analog designer, and an RF/microwave design and a digital designer and a CS/programmer guy, and a heat transfer guy. Basically I have to be all these because there is no clear boundary anymore (ever??). Putting yourself in a little silo of "expertise" is the surest way of making yourself obsolete quick.
What? What you want to say or suggest? Plz tel...
"Life is Change. So Don't Waste Your Time in Thinking."
Analog...
form changing with time.
Seemed funny to me.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ok, Now i got it.
"Life is Change. So Don't Waste Your Time in Thinking."