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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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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...
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.
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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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.
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!
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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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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.
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?
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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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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