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DESIGNCON FUSION

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı ASSICs? ı Tail Wags Dog ı Shades of Gray ı You Only Live Twice ı Nice ICE ı Sources and PDF

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

Trolling the exhibit floor, I came across an outfit I hadnıt heard of before, Anadigm. The booth touted their field-programmable analog array.

Cool. Iıve followed the development of analog programmable logic closely over the years, considering its potential to do to op-amps what PLDs and FPGAs did to TTL.

Hey, wait a minute. This Anadigm gadget looks really familiar (see Figure 4). Sure enough itıs a kissing cousin of the MPAA (Circuit Cellar 87, "Array of Analog Hope") that Motorola dabbled with a few years back before they threw in the towel on their entire programmable logic effort.

Figure 4ıItıs déjà vu all over again. Both the company (Anadigm) and the product (FPAA) trace their roots back to Motorolaıs earlier programmable analog logic forays.

It turns out that some of the MPAA insiders made a deal to pick up the pieces and the FPAA is the result.

At this point, what theyıre bringing to the party is improved tools including a simulator, new EV board (see Photo 3), more extensive library of canned functions, and a more aggressive price.

Photo 3ıThe FPAA evaluation board connects to a host via RS-232 and can store up to four complete FPAA configurations in onboard flash memory for push-button access.

The idea of analog programmable logic may seem obvious, but it has yet to be proven in the marketplace. With outfits like Lattice ("Analog PLD Anyone?," Circuit Cellar Online (March, 2000)) and now Anadigm weighing in, maybe the concept will finally start making its way out of the lab and into mainstream designs.

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