Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotAWorkNick | Hacker News Reader

“If it’s made out of electrical components then you should be able to scale it down to a microchip,” he says. “I think that’s where they’re going with this.”

Mind.Blown. This could be a very interesting development.

Which would be best for this - ASIC,FPGA,VLSI? Something else? for a rapid prototype setup?

View on HN

None. This is an analog computer. There are devices such as the field programmable analog array (FPAA) however that may be suitable.

https://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp

https://anabrid.com/ is working on programmable analog computer on a chip though. So far they are only selling discrete hybrid calculators and an educational "cheap" analog computer. https://the-analog-thing.org/wiki/Main_Page

Those FPAA seem just to be programmable analog filters not analog (or hybrid) computers.

Actually you can do a lot of computation with filters but you’re completely incorrect about what a FPAA is.

The FPAA is a matrix of switched capacitors. Such a matrix can be used to design an analog computer. There’s a pretty huge body of literature on this subject.

I’d bet that the OP could have implemented this using FPAA.

Randomly picked a paper https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7027875

You are correct. However I don't see anything on implementing exponentials or logarithms of signals thus i am confused how one would implement the product of time time continuous signals. I saw an screenshot in anadimgs software which suggested that a small number of such multipliers can be modelled but I am unsure how. If you have some explanation where inside the block diagram these analog multipliers would be implemented that would be helpful.

Anadigm is a bit shy about numbers one would care about as analog programmer. How many multipliers with constants, summers, multipliers of two signals and integrators are available on the chip? Resource on that would be welcome.

search 'memristor neural network'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com