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End of the analog era
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dirtcooker:
When turning on a modern piece of gear such as a TV, A/V receiver, test equipment, etc, I sometimes joke that you have to wait for its "vacuum tubes" to warm up.
Microwave antennas are the final frontier of analog. In some equipment the only remaining analog elements are the amplifier and filter at the radiating element, followed by an a/d and/or d/a converter. Everything else is done in software. For larger arrays we are not there yet however, since fast converters are very power hungry, as are FPGA's to run the software.
rsjsouza:
As others have said, this overblown statement that analog is dead has been spewed for at least a couple of decades already.

Everything around us belongs to the continuous domain, which in electronics is dealt with an analog approach when creating circuits to extract and shape the information for other purposes (measurement, transmission, etc.). What was observed is that the manipulation is quite difficult to create and adapt to varying changes of parameters, scaling and sources, thus the work kept progressing to minimize these issues. One of the popular solutions was to move to a simpler quantized domain, which gained tremendous ground in the past decades. Although still comprised of analog circuits, the quantized domain reduces the external world to finite amounts of levels (digits) that can be controlled in a more deterministic way and, provided the levels are in sufficient number, can be sent back to the continuous domain in a way that accomplishes the task well enough - if applied to human interfaces (eyes, ears, etc.), it "fools us" very efficiently in believing the reproduction is good enough.

That is what is changing: the interface between continuous and quantized domains is narrowing down to the sub-chip level. Otherwise, it is still pretty active.
Bud:
Try to listen to binary audio, watch a binary TV , eat binary food and that will give you the answer if the analog era is over.
NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: Bud on June 20, 2021, 06:53:17 pm ---Try to listen to binary audio

--- End quote ---
Isn't that called DSD?
Doctorandus_P:
Digital elelectronics does not exist.
It's just analog electronics that conveys digital information.

These days we need carefully designed transmission lines for USB, length and impedance matching for DDRx chips etc. And oh, don't forget your decoupling capacitors.
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