Displaying posts in the categoryAnalog and Mixed-Signal
Analog and Mixed-Signal articles
Memory
In-memory compute (IMC) does the arithmetic inside the memory array instead of moving data out to a processor. For AI inference, the weights stay in place, the input activations drive the wordlines, and each bitline adds up the products, so the multiply-accumulate happens where the data lives. It matters because moving a number costs far more energy than computing with it: in published 45 nm figures, a 32-bit DRAM read costs about 640 pJ against…
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Murugavel Ganesan
August 27, 2026
HotTopic
Analog security is the protection of the continuous-signal parts of a system, such as sensors, ADCs, PHYs, RF front ends and power management, against tampering, leakage and fault injection. It is becoming urgent for two reasons. Multi-die packages split a design into chiplets whose links can be probed or spoofed, and edge devices increasingly make decisions, and train models, on analog sensor data. Digital security has mature tools; analog secu…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 10, 2025
Video
DSP is replacing much of the analog signal processing inside high-speed SerDes because, at 100 Gb/s per lane and above with PAM4 signalling, it is easier to digitise the received signal with a fast ADC and equalise it in digital logic than to do the same work with analog circuits. Digital equalisers scale with each new process node, can be made much longer and more flexible, and behave the same across process, voltage and temperature. Analog doe…
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 20, 2025
Signal Processing
A SerDes (serialiser/deserialiser) can recover its data in two broad ways. A classic analog SerDes shapes and slices the signal with continuous-time circuits: transmit pre-emphasis, a CTLE, a small DFE and an analog clock and data recovery loop. A DSP-based SerDes digitises the received signal early with a fast ADC and does most of the equalisation, timing recovery and detection in digital logic. Analog designs still win on power and latency for…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 16, 2025
Tutorials
The main types of IC design are digital, analog, mixed-signal, RF (radio frequency), memory and power design. They differ in the signals they handle, the transistor behaviour they rely on, the process technologies they use and the way they are verified. Digital design is largely automated and measured in logic correctness, timing and power; analog, RF and power design are hand-crafted around device physics, noise and efficiency; memory design pu…
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 14, 2023
Tutorials
Analog circuits still win wherever a signal enters or leaves the physical world, and wherever the job is simple, fast or very low power. Their main advantages over digital circuits are no conversion step and no quantisation error, lower latency, fewer parts for simple functions, very low standby power, and a direct fit to sensors, antennas, speakers and power stages. Digital wins on noise immunity, precision, programmability and scaling, so most…
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 15, 2023
Tutorials
Digital circuits beat analog circuits on noise immunity, exact copying and storage, programmability, and the cost and density benefits of CMOS scaling. They work because each signal only has to be read as a 0 or a 1, so small amounts of noise, drift and component tolerance are simply ignored. Analog circuits still matter at the edges of every system, where real-world signals are sensed, amplified, converted and driven, but almost all processing …
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 14, 2023
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