Do you guys envisage a future where there will be no more analog electronics? This is because they will be replaced by powerful, cheap MCUs to manipulate the input signal to produce whatever output desired with signal processing using ADC input and DAC output.
Is this a possible future?
How is ADC-MCU-DAC different than hardware electronics?
CrossRoads:
How is ADC-MCU-DAC different than hardware electronics?
Sorry, bad choice of words on my part. I should say analog electronics, not hardware electronics.
Same question then - How is ADC-MCU-DAC different than analog electronics?
Are you suggesting everything will be digitized and processed that way, with no analog manipulation at all?
I think there will always be some an analog involved, even if it just filtering for noise reduction before digitizing, or offsetting the voltate from a +/- signal to + only to make it easier to digitize.
No.
You may see a bleak future of an all digital/microcontroller world, but I still see the happy analog world filled with rainbows and ponies and wondrous things!
lightaiyee:
Is this a possible future?
No - you know why? Because at the very bottom, way down at the nanometer trace level on the IC die - is still good 'ole analog (and discrete) electronics.
Do you know how digital electronics work? Have you ever studied the history of electronics? Do you know what RTL and DTL are?
If you don't, then you owe it to yourself to learn - as well as learn about how vacuum tubes work, and why - along with their original discovery (oh, Edison - had you and Tesla not been such prideful fools!) - oh, and crystal radio, of course (which indirectly led to the invention of the transistor - in fact, long before the first crude transistor was invented, people were experimenting with multiple-contact crystal detectors, which were really close to what a transistor is).
Also - did you know you can make a transistor using water...? It's not very efficient, but it does work...
Well if the question was framed in a matter to ask "will ICs (integrated circuits) continue to decrease the amount of on board discrete analog components and circuitry" the answer would be a definite yes. But the fundamentals of analog electronics will always apply and there will always be some design cases where discrete analog components and circuitry will still be used over a chip solution.
One only has to look at a modern DDS chip to see how much discrete analog circuitry for RF applications can be replaced with a single chip and a few external filtering components. For example:
Lefty
But at the end of the day you have analogue ears and eyes, and voltages above 5V are needed to drive all sorts if things. Also analogue electronics is the only way to amplify small signals to get them into the digital domain.