Let there be light, and it was analog. So when did analog electronics come back on the scene? I thought everything was digital... Analog never went away. It just got digitized, but then came along automobile electronics with radar, emission controls, temps, pressures, etc. Also the factories filled up with DC motors, 3-phase motors, stepper motors with PID controllers, and enough noise filters and comparitor chips to fill a dump truck. Op amps, feedback loops, and mathy chunks of code passed in through modules that do calculus versus just count. The IoT grew up and became AIoT. So this month, I tip my hat to the analog designers and their gadgets.

Analog electronics are best tucked away inside clever chips that do the heavy lifting because designing analog circuits is as much an artform as science. Everything varies with temperature and humidity. This is where resistance morphs into impedance. What the heck is impedance? Impedance is the effective resistance felt in an electronic circuit that takes into account inductance and capacitance effects. Our old friends voltage and current are still there, but reactance causes voltages and currents to stimulate these effects. The real world is full of varying voltages and currents. Some are just noise and some are by design like radio waves, vibrations, or mechanical resonance. Impedance can cause a phase shift between voltage and current. Sound complex? It is.

But from the hobbyist point of view or student looking for career opportunity, analog design is not only interesting, it can be lucrative. Automobiles have become as complex electronically as IC fabrication...well maybe that's hyperbole but now you need to know the math behind a hyperbolic curve. We need to measure and control in between the digitized descrete levels and pay attention to resonance and variation on a continuous scale not just when we jump from one state to another.

Make no mistake, our precious computers are still at the heart of taking in all this analog data and organizing the answers. Now the programmer needs to understand how signal conditioning works and how best to get the analog world into digital form. Just to pick the modules and libraries that do the main work requires knowledge of what problems these libraries answer and how the various methods work.

So let's pull up a white board. This is going to be a bumpy ride.