[Editor's Notebook]
Digital Technology Fuels The Analog Career Revolution
Digital technology advances are supplying analog designers with a linearly upward career path.
John Edwards
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ED Online ID #20562 |
January 22, 2009
For Robert Dobkin, analog design is more than a career—it’s a lifetime mission, something close to an obsession. “Analog designers are grown. They don’t usually come out of college,” observes Dobkin, vice president of engineering and chief technical officer at Linear Technology in Milpitas, Calif.
Often misunderstood and sometimes even derided by their digital design brethren, analog designers understand that in today’s ones-and-zeros world it’s easy to overlook the continuing vital role that’s played by analog. Markets ranging from automotive technologies to communications systems to consumer appliances all wouldn’t exist in their current forms without analog chips and circuits.
“It really still is an analog world in that our senses as humans are analog receptors,” says Steven Macaluso, an analog design manager at Fairchild Semiconductor in South Portland, Maine. “We still need to convert the digital information that is available into something that our senses are capable of interpreting.”
Jason Rhode, president and CEO of Cirrus Logic in Austin, Texas, agrees. “There may be an increasing number of digital solutions in an analog world, but the reality is that all the physical stimuli you’ll encounter in your life are analog,” Rhode says.
Since human evolution isn’t likely to catch up with digital progress anytime soon, analog shows no signs of going away, and perhaps never will. “Analog pervades everything. It’s always been there and it’s always going to be there,” declares Fred Wise, staffing director for National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, Calif. “Whatever new digital products or technologies come and go over the years, analog has always been an underlying foundation for the ability of all those products to succeed.”
With analog systems still firmly embedded in the technosphere, and generally more difficult to develop than comparable digital circuits, finding qualified designers continues to be a major challenge for product manufacturers and other companies, even during hard economic times. But what’s a headache for employers is nothing less than great news for analog designers, many of whom enjoy a level of security, recognition, and appreciation that other designers can only imagine.
“It’s a good field to get into, if you have the natural talent, and very few leave it voluntarily,” says David Robertson, product line director for Analog Devices’ High-Speed Signal Processing Group, based in Norwood, Mass. “The point to remember is that if you’re very good at what you do, you’ll always be in demand.”
Tied at the Hip
Wise dismisses the notion, popular with some digital types, that analog is an innovation backwater and that analog designers are mostly stuck working with dull, uninteresting technologies. He notes that analog and digital are, in fact, tied at the hip. “If someone is truly interested in analog design and has a good understanding of the field, the opportunities are really unlimited,” he says.
Wise explains that companies in the analog world, by the nature of their technology, need to be very close to the people that use a wide range of leading-edge consumer and business technologies, such as mobile phones, media players, IP phone systems, and flatscreen TVs. “All of these things change and shape users’ sensory perception, so analog designers have to get involved in all of these products keep up with new developments in these areas,” he says.
For the past several years, analog designers have played a key role in one of the electronics industry’s major technology battlefields—power. “With analog, we think about amplifiers, data converters, RF, and so on. But right now, the single largest analog segment is actually power management,” Robertson says. “The drive for power and power efficiency is one of the things that’s made power management such a growth area.”
Macaluso says he feels continuous pressure to provide the best possible power characteristics in his designs. “Every handheld portable device you have is powered by a battery, and you want to get as much life out of this as you can before you need to charge it,” he explains. “So your goal is to keep the power consumption of whatever chips Fairchild puts in there to a minimum.”
Beyond power issues, analog designers are focusing on the task of bringing better quality and usability to an emerging generation of personal communications and entertainment devices. “There’s audio everywhere and people who never cared about it before now care about it all the time,” Rhode says. “For us, audio is a big deal and its importance is increasing every year.”
The automotive market is also turning to analog designers in ever-greater numbers for technologies that will support a new generation of infotainment devices and safety systems, such as accelerometers that automatically initiate airbag deployment during a crash. “Fifteen years ago, there was nothing in your car that measured acceleration or rapid deceleration,” Robertson says. “You had a speedometer, but the only thing that told you that you had gone through an event of rapid deceleration was your forehead hitting the windshield.”
Bob Pease loses his job at National even though he's widely recognised as one-of-the-best analog engineers.
James Peterson keeps his job as CEO of Microsemi even after he's beeen exposed as faking his credentials.
So, the moral if this contrast is either analog engineering is dead, or none of the engineering skills is appreciated in this age.
Better get out of ones and zeros as well as phase margins, and jump into the money stream.
The money stream theory states that a person is rewarded and appreciated depending on how close he is to the money stream. That theory seems to stand the test of time better than both Boolean algebra and Bode laws.
Mau Duc Pham -April 08, 2009
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