Dev kit is $200. Chip is listed at Arrow for ~$10, but out of stock.
I wonder if you could do some interesting analog audio stuff, like building low part count multi-speaker crossover networks, etc. Then again, for $10 apiece, it probably still makes way more sense to just put a cortex or something on there and do it all digitally.
You could market it to the analog-or-nothing crowd in the audio community. Decreasing production time of "boutique" analog clone effects pedals could make you some cash.
That would be neat— a reconfigurable effect pedal that you could download and install new patches for.
The _real_ trick would be providing the option to route the signals out of this thing and through vacuum tube stages, so you're not stuck trying to build a decent overdrive or compressor with silicon-only components.
They sell the dev kit for the current AN231E04 part, but at least the Asian distributor does not stock it (only back order), and over $200, but at least it is available from 1. If I'd just want the part, it comes in 1000 increments...
I'd have some more ideas for lab instruments, but under these circumstances it cannot really be used for product development, sadly
With all the fake electronic parts coming from china, are those companies a trustworthy long term source for such companies ? Not sure.
One common advice is to buy from authorized sources, and looking through octopart[1], arrow is the only distributor of anadgim, with 1000 units minimum quantities.
Signal conditioning is still an important part of EE design. Not all signals are TTL level and unipolar.
For example, this appnote[0] uses a Delta-Sigma converter to digitize a load cell, with the ability to "detect one sheet of copier paper dropped on a stack of 20 reams". In order to do this, it relies on an intrumentation amplifier and custom correlated-double sampling to get a measurement accurate to 200,000 counts.
And even if your input signal can be directly input to your ADC, you'll still need an analog anti-aliasing filter.
Signal conditioning is an important part of signal processing that has to happen in the analog domain.
I don't think they are talking about silicon designers.
The article quotes the professor as hoping FPAA's will allow "a wide range of less-skilled users to try out sophisticated, low-power (analog) techniques".
In other words, typical device-level design engineers.
Analog designer experience and skills are akin to "black magic", at least as whispered in the halls of electrical engineering schools 15 years ago.
Analog is just devilishly harder when compared to digital IC design; forget about hysteresis curve cutoffs and resulting 'clean' abstractions of 0 and 1.
Basically, it's four op amps, plus programmable circuitry for all the accessory stuff needed to build most of the things you can do with four op amps. This is neat, but four op amps isn't much analog computation. Here's the block diagram of a classic, very successful analog control system: the F-16's original stability control system: http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png
So this isn't for analog computation, it's for front-ending digital systems where you need to do some filtering at a faster speed than a DSP approach can handle.
The Cypress PSoC line seems to be a whole ARM processor with a little analog stuff added.
Too bad the market is still tough for low-volume FPAA's (vs. FPGA's). A product I was working on last year desperately needed FPAA's in low volumes (think 1k-2k MOQ), and was shelved largely because the lack of market availability.
The design was changed to reflect the lack of availability of a low-volume FPAA at a reasonable price point, but this drove the feature set down and the price up until the product was shelved. Until they make them as easily available and as low-cost and many comparable FPGAs, it's going to be hard to design niche-market products around them.
In our experience, the primary issues was the available number of analog I/Os, we were doing large-scale matrix-like switching between analog sources. That is to say, the PSoCs contained a small number of analog I/Os that could be routed relative to a "dedicated" FPAA.
This. I was about to bring up the Anadigm source and then saw the date. Not sure why this is news since there are products in the market and demand scale has not surfaced to help ramp up the supply availability and product variations that could make it a healthy market.
This may be completely not what you're looking for, but take a look at Cypress' PSOC devices. They have an interesting mix of analog and digital programmable blocks.
You can do digital control of analog circuits, PGA, digital pots, etc.
Just had a fun idea, you could use an LED to charge a rotating photoluminescent medium and then read out the intensity some rotation angle later, it be like a magnetic tape loop but have its own decay as well. Modulate the speed of rotation, the read angle and the intensity of the write.
I graduated before we got it releasable, and haven't had much time with my job to finish up the project. I don't have more time to add to this explanation, but if you want more info or implementation help, feel free to email me: alecdibble at gmail dot com.
I believe I read a while that they demonstrated it in a synthesizer application at a music expo, and I've heard rumors that they are already used in some commercial analog synthesizers.
Audio-synthesis has been using these kinds of technologies for decades. Its not unusual for synth/audio-processor manufacturers to make their own custom ASIC's, FPGA's, even small-quantity chipfab runs, to provide their IP to the customer. Synthesis is very promiscuous in this regard; you can make sound with a surprising number of things in the universe.
I well aware of the prevalence of the technologies you list in the synthesizer industry, but custom ASICs or FPGAs are quite obviously not the same thing as FPAA.
This sounds like it could be a great fit for Software Defined Radio.