Recent Development in Analog Computation - A Brief Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in analog computation, highlighting its energy efficiency advantages, architectural innovations, and ongoing challenges like accuracy and speed limitations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of analog computation systems, emphasizing recent architectural and circuit design innovations that enhance energy efficiency.

Findings

Analog systems achieve higher energy efficiency than digital counterparts.

Innovative architectures and circuits mitigate some disadvantages of analog computation.

Analog computation is suitable for power-sensitive applications despite accuracy and speed trade-offs.

Abstract

The recent development in analog computation is reviewed in this paper. Analog computation was used in many applications where power and energy efficiency is of paramount importance. It is shown that by using innovative architecture and circuit design, analog computation systems can achieve much higher energy efficiency than their digital counterparts, as they are able to exploit the computational power inherent to the devices and physics. However, these systems do suffer from some disadvantages, such as lower accuracy and speed, and designers have come up with novel approaches to overcome them. The paper provides an overview of analog computation systems, from basic components such as memory and arithmetic elements, to architecture and system design.