ZRNA – Software-defined analog circuits

&gt; <i>We achieve this with the union of a field-programmable analog array (FPAA), an ARM processor and state-of-the-art firmware. An FPAA is similar in concept to a field-programmable gate array, but instead of logic elements, it is composed of analog elements: opamps, comparators, capacitors and switches. These fundamental elements are used to build higher level modules like filters, oscillators and gain stages.</i><p>Is it going to inspire a wave of FPAA hobbyist devboardvs and activities (just like microcontroller and later FPGA)? If so, we are surely living in a great time of computing.

I&#x27;m divided on this. It&#x27;s hard for me to figure out what this hardware is actually good for, and particularly in which use cases it beats FPGAs. As far as I can see, FPGAs or DSP-cores in MCUs&#x2F;processors seem to be the real competitor, and the question will be at what sampling rate a DSP solution will outperform whatever this ZRNA does.<p>And on top of that, the API looks quite understandable, so it may be easier to use the ZRNA for a certain signal processing task than create a custom DSP Core in Verilog or dig through MCU documentation. Though you could probably make an API for generating verilog code for the Icestorm toolchain, which would not require deep knowledge of digital design.<p>Other questions are bandwidth and sampling constraints. It seems to have at least one ADC...

Cypress PSoC does something similar. FPGA-light with some analog &quot;wiring&quot; configurability.

I bought some of the Anadigm FPAAs a while ago, I need to get round to using them, one thing to note though is they seem to use the discrete time style circuit, so they actually switch at a high frequency between different capacitors to generate a filter.

It should support ChucK[1] for easy editing and prototyping, that would be a great integration!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chuck.cs.princeton.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chuck.cs.princeton.edu&#x2F;</a>

Super cool tech!