Seismic Shift #1: The Analog Data Deluge

We live in a physical world that’s inherently analog, yet we thrive inside our digital society.  At the interface of these two planes is advanced analog electronics. Yet massive amounts of analog data will soon overwhelm our ability to process, move, store, and secure it.

Today, it is impossible to imagine daily life without analog microchips as they connect us to the external world. Analog chips produce the sounds of speech and music in our smartphones, measure our body temperature in electronic thermometers, and bring images to life on our computers, TVs and other devices. Automobiles and houses contain hundreds of analog chips that enable everything from Bluetooth to sensors to GPS and more. These microchips likewise drive multi-billion dollar businesses for leading manufacturers such as Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, and NXP Semiconductors.

All electronic devices use electrical signals to transmit information. Analog signals are electrical signals that correspond to the nonelectrical signals that our sense organs receive from the external world: sounds, images, odors, and many others. For example, the strength of an electrical current in a mobile phone rises and drops in proportion to the volume of the original sound. And vice versa, the electrical signals can produce analogous acoustic, optical, chemical, mechanical and many other signals.

Analog signals are continuous, whereas digital signals are not. Both analog and digital signals transmit information, but in digital technologies—used primarily in computing—the information is translated into binary format. An early example of digital representation was Morse Code—a combination of ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ pulses used to send different letters of the alphabet through telegraph wires. Information and communications technologies (ICT) require both analog and digital signals to function.

Our Analog World

The physical world is inherently analog, but the digital society we live in drives increasing demand for advanced analog electronics to enable interaction between the physical and cyber worlds. In fact, when digital computers first came to existence, the immediate challenge was their interfacing with the physical world of continuous signals through analogous electrical representation. Analog-to-digital converters (ADC) were created to meet this challenge; they are the doors that allow us to get information in and out of digital machines.

Also, all inputs humans can perceive are analog, which calls for bio-inspired solutions for world-machine interfaces that can sense, perceive, and reason based on ultra-compressed sensing capability and low-operation power. This extends to real-world interfaces such as communication channels (wired or wireless), machine and infrastructure sensing and control, as well as environmental, diagnostic, and the conversion of naturally produced energy into usable power sources.

The Analog Data Deluge

The world-machine interface lies at the heart of our currenty. Sensing the environment around us is fundamental to the next generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where devices will be capable of perception and reasoning on sensed data that often appears noisy and stochastic. Today, the ability to generate analog data is growing faster than our ability to intelligently use the data. This situation will become even more serious in the near future, when data from our lives as well as from IoT sensors may create an analog data deluge that will obscure valuable information when we need it most. Sensor technologies are experiencing exponential growth with forecasts of ~45 trillion sensors in 2032 that will generate >1 million zettabytes (10^27 bytes) of data per year. This is equivalent to ~10^20 bit/s, thereby surpassing the collective human sensing throughput. Such massive amounts of data will soon surpass our ability to transmit that data to the cloud for processing due to limits of communications capacity, energy, and timeliness of information. Moreover, our current paradigm severely limits our ability to unlock the full potential of the data revolution.

A Paradigm Shift Holds the Key

Our ability to perceive the physical world is significantly limited. To address the ongoing data deluge, we need to develop revolutionary technologies that increase useful and actionable information with less energy and data bits, e.g. sensing-to-analog-to-information reduction with a practical compression/reduction ratio of 10^5:1.

The human brain operates in such a manner and may hold the key in pursuit of novel methods to compress data. The human sensory system absorbs ~10 Mbits/s, while our brain processes less than 100 ‘conscious bits’ per second. With this our brain effectively reconstructs and operates in complex environments, thus achieving a “data to information bits” ratio of more than 100,000:1.

Modeling solutions on human neural processing may help us harness the power of our data for useful and actionable information. For many real-time applications, the value of sensory data is brief, sometimes only a few milliseconds. The data must be utilized within that time frame and in many cases locally for latency and security considerations.

The future of manufacturing is expected to come from next-generation analog-driven industrial electronics that include sensing, robotics, AI and machine learning across industrial, automotive, medical, and many others. Our ability to collect, process and communicate analog data at the input/output boundaries is critical for the future world of IoT and Big Data. Through collaborative research, we have the opportunity to establish revolutionary paradigms for energy-efficient analog integrated circuits for the vast range of data types, workloads and applications tomorrow’s generation will require.

The Decadal Plan for Semiconductors, outlines research priorities that can help us meet the needs of future generations. Developed by leaders across academia, government and industry, the report identifies five seismic shifts shaping the future of semiconductor technologies and calls for an annual $3.4 billion federal investment over the next decade to fund research and development across these five areas.

Read the full report at src.org/decadalplan. Watch the SIA/SRC webinar Decadal Plan for Semiconductors: New Trajectories for Analog Electronics and read the webinar Q&A.

This article was authored by David Robertson, Senior Technology Director at Analog Devices, Jim Wieser, Director of University Research and Technology at Texas Instruments, and Victor Zhirnov, Chief Scientist at Semiconductor Research Corporation.