Analog circuits and systems have become more important to mainstream computing recently due to a multitude of reasons. The foreseeable end of Moore's law in computing is one such reason where limits imposed by excessive physical power dissipation in digital circuits play an important role. Analog circuits on the other hand has been touted as intrinsically low power, thus having the potential to at least partially alleviate the problem. This award funds a workshop that will explore the current state of the art in analog computing by bringing together the leading academics and theoreticians, along with industry practitioners under one roof for a period of two days. Presentations will be made by leaders in the field, and brainstorming sessions will be held to chart the direction of future research in the field. The discussions will be documented in the form of a report, which will not only form the basis for future work among scientists and engineers but will also be disseminated in the form of public websites and NSF projects reports. Selected students will be invited to participate in the workshop by paying due attention to the diversity of the group of attendees to include women and other underrepresented groups.
Progress in technology enabling larger scale integration has also made analog circuits and systems more viable. While noise and attendant uncertainties inherent to the analog circuits still plague them, newer architectures and problem domains show promise where the deleterious effects of noise could be minimized. Still newer interest in analog neural networks (using e.g., deep learning) attests to this emerging trend. Other technological innovations, e.g., radio frequency techniques, optical, quantum and other emerging technologies for device and/or interconnect can also exploit analog techniques. The ultimate power of analog computing, as compared to the digital circuits is also being investigated. While the Turing machine has been a idealized model of computation for digital computers and the ultimate theoretical power of a (digital) computing machine has been assessed in this framework, similar studies for analog computing have been in nascent in the literature. For example, results classifying the analog complexity of computational problems in classes analogous to say, P, NP etc. is an area being revisited by theoretical researchers due to renewed interest in analog computing. The impact of this loosely connected body of research to practice - especially in the design of hardware for solving practical problems - remains to be seen, and will be central to the workshop.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
