Analog's answer to FPGA opens field to masses (2008)

Fast forward 6 years and it looks like they are available from a company called Anadigm ( <a href="http://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anadigm.com&#x2F;fpaa.asp</a> ).<p>This sounds like it could be a great fit for Software Defined Radio.

<i>Rough estimates suggest there are around 3,000 analog engineers in the world</i><p>That&#x27;s the real order of magnitude of the number of analog engineers?

You don&#x27;t get that much analog per chip yet. See<p><a href="http://www.anadigm.com/_doc/DS231000-U001.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anadigm.com&#x2F;_doc&#x2F;DS231000-U001.pdf</a><p>Basically, it&#x27;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&#x27;t much analog computation. Here&#x27;s the block diagram of a classic, very successful analog control system: the F-16&#x27;s original stability control system: <a href="http://thelexicans.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/yf16fcs.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thelexicans.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;yf16fcs.png</a><p>So this isn&#x27;t for analog computation, it&#x27;s for front-ending digital systems where you need to do some filtering at a faster speed than a DSP approach can handle.<p>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&#x27;s (vs. FPGA&#x27;s). A product I was working on last year desperately needed FPAA&#x27;s in low volumes (think 1k-2k MOQ), and was shelved largely because the lack of market availability.<p>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&#x27;s going to be hard to design niche-market products around them.

This article is from 2008. Is there any particular reason its here?

I recently bought some FPAAs from Anadigm, specifically the 3.3V version: AN231E04-E2-QFNSP<p>Interestingly they use a switched-capacitor design, which means you can only input signals lower than the clock frequency used for switching the caps.<p>I had a look for continuous-time FPAAs but couldn&#x27;t find any.<p>My goal is simply to make a guitar FX pedal with them, as they can alter gain, perform filtering such band-pass etc.<p>Potentially I could see it having lower latency than DSP, if anyone knows more about that, I&#x27;d be very curious.

I wonder if you could use it to build a synthesizer. That would be amazing - a modular analog synthesizer on a chip.

Two of the sub-comments here mention them, but anyone interested in this sort of chip should check out Cypress&#x27;s PSoC line.