Is Configurable Analog VLSI becoming a reality?

Last several years have seen an increasing demand for portable applications, and as a result, many applications are power constrained, including handheld and wireless applications, resulting in an ever increasing demand for increased computational resources in a constant power environment. One approach would be to consider using analog techniques, which shows order of magnitude improved power efficiencies, but lacks the programmability, configurability, and technical infrastructure that we see with typical digital techniques. Recent advances in analog signal processing, neuromorphic engineering, and programmable / configurable analog approaches seem to have bridged these gaps, and as a result could launch an exponential growth in analog computation that we saw in in digital IC design over 30 years ago.

We will start with a short history on how digital circuits progressed from a circuit centric technology to a very high-level system technology. We will notice that a programmable digital technology overtook a relatively fixed analog technology. We will discuss how the analog circuit and signal processing techniques have progressed, including discussing our research at Georgia Tech on programmable analog circuits, programmable system design, and configurable systems. We will discuss the applications of these technologies to various applications including wireless communication, classification, image processing, and audio processing. We will then present possible roadmaps of analog signal processing technology going
forward, as well as the upcoming challenges are for these approaches to reach the level of design complexity we currently expect for digital computation.

Paul Hasler is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Hasler received his M.S. and B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State
University in 1991, and received his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in Computation and Neural Systems in 1997. Dr. Hasler received the NSF CAREER Award in 2001, and the ONR Young Investigator Award (YIP) award in 2002. Dr. Hasler received the Paul Raphorst Best Paper Award, IEEE Electron Devices Society, 1997; a Best Paper Award at SCI 2001; Best Sensor Track Paper, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2005; Best Student Paper Award, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)
2006; Best Student Paper Award, IEEE Ultrasound Symposium, 2006, and Best Demonstration Paper Award, IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2010. Dr. Hasler is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Hasler was a member of the Defense Science Research Council (DSRC) between 2007 and 2009, a founder of GTronix in 2002-2010 and a founder of Neuromorphix in 2007-2011.