WBT Industry Related Off Topic., page-104

Thanks for posting.

I'm afraid the reporter got me offside with his opening sentence.

"Old technology" - Ouch!

He is equating analogue with old. After all, analogue is what came before, and was superseded by, digital. Right? Wrong. But an easy mistake to make, especially if you don't know what you're talking about.

We live in an analogue world. Audio is analogue. The detectors in cameras (CCDs & APSs) are analogue. LCDs are analogue. Batteries are analogue. Most things we wish to measure (e.g. temperature, pressure, velocity) are analogue quantities. We interface between the real analogue world, and our created digital world, via ADCs and DACs.

Semiconductors, and the thermionic valves that preceded them, operate on principles that are analogue in nature. Microprocessors and the various semiconductor memory classes are all analogue at heart. We engineer these devices to be 'digital' by the use of positive feedback to create two-state circuits (another term for flip-flop is bi-stable) and by the use of threshold levels, where an essentially analogue phenomenon is deemed to be a 1 above a certain threshold and a zero below another threshold. The gap between the two threshold levels is designed to ensure separation, with any level falling between them deemed to be an 'illegal' or 'undefined' state.

All telecommunications, whether it be via cable, optical fibre, or wireless (radio) is, in reality, analogue (regardless of whether it is referred to as digital).

Granted, there are some examples, most notably magnetic media (also the punch cards of old), where the underlying principle is actually two-state. However, even then the read/write is performed by fundamentally analogue devices.

The reason we go to so much trouble is, of course, because of the precision and power of digital data processing, and the fidelity of digital transmission and storage.

We are now starting to see hybrid analogue/digital devices, where edge computing is placed on-chip together with the analogue circuitry that interfaces to, and communicates via, our analogue world. This could be a big part of Intel's thinking behind their move and why it is of interest to WBT.

NB: The above post is a stream of consciousness rant and should not be construed as financial advice.