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player ready...Analog chip designers are a rare breed in digital-mad Silicon Valley, where turning everything from photographs to music to video into digitized content is a way of life.
While digital engineers work with information that is already binary–turned into electrical signals in a sequence of zeros and ones–analog engineers have the task of turning real-world sights and sounds into those strings of numbers.
They are, in short, artists.
“A lot of this is about understanding the technology, but also having a feel,” said Pat Brockett, head of National Semiconductor Corp.’s analog products group. “It’s not something that you can just program into a computer. These people are exceedingly creative folks.”
To understand the difference between analog and digital forms, think about time. Time is analog, which means that it moves continuously. Yet for time to be useful to people, we must measure it in discrete chunks–digits, if you will–such as minutes or seconds, ignoring smaller amounts in between.
That’s also the way a computer chip works, viewing all information as ones or zeros, depending on whether electrical current is on or off.
A typical example of how analog technology is used is in cell phones. The human voice and other sounds are analog, ranging across a continuous range of pitches, from high to low. However, in order for an analog signal to pass through a modern cellular phone, it must be converted into a digital signal using an analog-to-digital converter chip. Since people can’t hear a string of numbers, the signal must be converted back to an analog sound so it can be heard at the other end.
Crafting a chip that can do such conversions requires a special touch, and the ability to do it is passed on from master to apprentice like the craftsmen’s guilds of the Middle Ages.
Before an analog engineer can even begin work on a chip, he can spend hours, even days, trying to convert an ever-changing temperature, sight or sound into a voltage and a current and then into a digital signal that a computer can read. It is an imprecise art that takes patience, persistence, intuition and creativity.
“Digital logic designers are dealing with clear, known facts. They know what the input and output is,” said Drew Peck, a stock analyst at SG Cowen & Co. “In analog, you are dealing with an infinite variation of possible signals, and therefore it is all gray.”
Ron Mancini, a staff scientist at Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc., the leader in the analog chip business, notes that analog designers don’t even start to use a computer to design the circuits in a chip until they have created a test circuit by hand using a few transistors to try out different possibilities. It’s like a painter exploring different approaches in charcoal.
“The three most important things are your brain, a pencil and a pad of paper,” said Jim Goreki, chief technology officer at Accelerant Networks Inc., a maker of high-speed communications chips outside of Portland, Ore.
Goreki, a respected analog designer, also was one of the founders of Level One Communications Inc., bought by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. in 1999.
Like artists, analog designers sign or initial their circuit designs, the massive, multicolored blueprints of a chip’s circuitry pattern. At National, the fifth-largest maker of analog chips, designers pin up their designs in their cubicles.
“I want to touch and feel things that I do,” said Erroll Dietz, who oversees many of the analog designers at National.