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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!

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To: Allen Benn who wrote (1493)	7/15/1997 5:20:00 AM
From: Don Lloyd	of 10309

Allen,<<digital hearing aid>> . Your essay was very interesting, as usual, and quite persuasive. However I believe that your judgement that analog is obsolete is only true in the sense that analog computers no longer are useful and that many signal processing functions HAVE correctly migrated into the digital domain. While an increasing number of applications will allow for the integration of analog functionality onto mixed signal IC's, there will remain a significant and necessary role for precision analog functions to interface between sensors and systems, with only a limited number being integrated into the sensors themselves, which you alluded to. .. Your essay tends to leave the impression that digital has inherent advantages over analog in terms of power consumption and electrical noise. The requirement for Pentium fans as processor speeds have increased illustrates that digital circuits have their own power problems as millions of node capacitances are continuously charged and discharged at high speed. This process also results in large amounts of electrical noise, which limit the ability to combine digital and low level analog signals in close proximity, whether on a single chip or even on a single assembly. Your discussion of signal-to-noise and bit precision only relate to converter quantization noise and not to either digitally induced noise into the analog signals or to the inherent thermal and excess noise present in the sensors and analog signal processing components. None of this in any way invalidates the overall theme of the essay. . Back to the hearing aid. I would expect that we would be within a decade or two anyway of being able to output directly to the nervous system, and bypass the need for an acoustic output transducer. Also, in the cases where a belt module is appropriate, the system partitioning should probably move as much functionality as possible to the belt module and minimize the amount in the ear, with advantages for power allocation. . Thanks for the interesting post. . Regards, Don

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