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MIT improves analog circuit for consumer devices

The MIT team showed a comparator-based switched capacitor (CBSC) circuit, which could be manufactured with smaller size and better power efficiency than traditional analog circuits using operational amplifiers. The team had presented a rougher version in 2006, and improved on the design this week by unveiling an 8-bit, 200 MHz analog-to-digital converter at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

"Analog circuits sit on PC boards; when you put a disc in a CD-ROM drive to play music, the music is encoded in digital format, but what you're hearing is analog. That's a digital-to-analog converter doing that," Lee said. Engineers could use the new CBSC circuit as a more efficient tool to filter and modulate analog data, leading to less expensive, longer-lasting devices. "Current analog circuits consume a disproportionate amount of power, which really drains the batteries. We think we can reduce the power consumption of analog circuits by at least an order of magnitude," he said.

InfoWorld

Posted by | Mon, Feb 19, 2007 - 07:51 AM