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undergoing a resurgence
It could be the key to making tomorrow’s smart tech sustainable.
Credit: Aspinity
T
By Kristin Houser his article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-
November 11, 2023 Fields
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To ensure the technology of tomorrow is both smart and sustainable, we may need
to revive a technology of the past: analog computing.
Smart sensors
Smart sensors are like Rosetta Stones for tech — they receive information from the
environment in the form of sound, light, heat, pressure, and other “languages” of
the physical world and translate it into the 1s and 0s understood by computers.
is translation tells us everything. It’s what lets you talk to Siri or Alexa, and it gives
your smart thermostat the ability to know when it’s time to kick on the heat. Smart
sensors make it possible for us to track our health with wearables, and they’re a key
component of autonomous cars.
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ose sensors will also be constantly draining energy — your smartphone, for
example, has sensors that are always on, digitizing everything they hear you say so
that they know when you’re trying to get the attention of an AI assistant.
Being tied to a battery that needs constant recharging limits what we can do with
our sensors, and if the batteries powering them are being charged by fossil fuel-
generated electricity, which they likely are, the sensors are also contributing to the
problem of climate change
Yes, the impact of one smartphone on the environment might be small, but it adds
up when you consider all the sensors we use today and all the sensors we’re
expected to use tomorrow.
Analog computing
Analog computers could be part of the solution to this sensor power problem.
ese are the types of computers we relied on before digital computers, and they
don’t need to translate their inputs into any special computer language before they
can process it and deliver a meaningful output.
Other analog computers are far more complicated, with complex systems of valves,
gears, vacuum tubes, electronic circuits, and more, and various designs could be
used to calculate everything from tide levels to the answers to di erential
equations.
The Reeves Electronic Analog Computer (REAC) used by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the precursor to
NASA) to run military simulations. Credit: NASA
While we still have analog computers, digital computers now dominate for several
reasons, a major one being their versatility.
While analog computers have traditionally been able to do just one type of
calculation, the microchips that do the “work” in today’s digital computers are
programmable with software to do countless tasks. Unlike yesterday’s analog
computers, those chips are also small, cheap, and easy to manufacture.
Hybrid approach
Pittsburgh-based microchip developer Aspinity is one of those leading the analog
charge with a programmable microchip called the AML100.
Just like the sensors in our phones, cars, and other tech, this microchip can
continuously receive data from the real world, such as sounds or movements. It can
also be programmed to detect something speci c, like the sound of you saying an
AI assistant’s wake words.
However, the AML100 doesn’t need to convert the real world data into binary to
know when you’ve said “Hey Siri” — using Aspinity’s machine learning models, it
can be programmed to identify the words in their analog form, which, in this case,
means sound waves.
Aspinity’s idea is that the AML100 could act as an intermediary between the real
world and the smart sensors we use today. In a smartphone, for example, an
AML100 could be programmed to continuously listen for an AI assistant’s wake
words. When it hears them, it could then rouse the digital sensor that can actually
understand and execute your commands for the AI.
at’s just one of many possible uses for the chips, though. We could integrate
them into home security systems so that they trigger a call to the police at the
sound of glass breaking, or put them in health wearables and have them activate an
alert if they sense an elevated heart rate.
“We can still have a combination of analog and digital locally, but we want to be
able to use that analog as your always-on computing and then wake up the digital
as necessary,” Aspinity CEO Tom Doyle told Freethink.
“We maximized the advantages of light and electricity under all-analog signals,
avoiding the drawbacks of analog-to-digital conversion and breaking the
bottleneck of power consumption and speed,” Tsinghua researcher Fang Lu told
Xinhua.
As has happened several times over the past two decades, a lack of funding has
forced him to put his research into analog computing on hold, but he’s still
convinced of its potential and told Wired in March 2023 that he’d be ready to dig
back into it if the funding came along.
“People do wonder why we are doing this when everything is digital,” said Tsividis.
“ ey say digital is the future, digital is the future — and of course it’s the future.
But the physical world is analog, and in between you have a big interface. at’s
where this ts.”
We’d love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a
tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at tips@freethink.com.
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