Rough estimates suggest there are around 3,000 analog engineers in the world
That's the real order of magnitude of the number of analog engineers?
That's the real order of magnitude of the number of analog engineers?
It used to be common up until about 10-15 years ago, but then DSP's came along.
Now, you take a signal, buffer it by the minimuum amount necessary to get it into the DSP, and call it a day.
The best case is, you don't touch the signal at all, because any caps, filters, op amps can all distort the original signal.
You can do it all digitally, and it's much easier to modify on the fly if your technique isn't working well.
Boards and boards full of touchy analog electronics have been replaced by a single DSP.
And not many people are looking back.
For example, this appnote[0] uses a Delta-Sigma converter to digitize a load cell, with the ability to "detect one sheet of copier paper dropped on a stack of 20 reams". In order to do this, it relies on an intrumentation amplifier and custom correlated-double sampling to get a measurement accurate to 200,000 counts.
And even if your input signal can be directly input to your ADC, you'll still need an analog anti-aliasing filter.
Signal conditioning is an important part of signal processing that has to happen in the analog domain.
[0] http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/application-note/an96fa.pdf
Your example however, doesn't really bolster your point.
Delta-Sigma modulation is a digital signal processing technique.
That particular chip is also using a digital FIR filters to reduce noise.
It's much less prevalent than digital logic, much harder, and slower moving industry as it doesn't benefit from Moore's law in the same way.
The article quotes the professor as hoping FPAA's will allow "a wide range of less-skilled users to try out sophisticated, low-power (analog) techniques".
In other words, typical device-level design engineers.
Analog is just devilishly harder when compared to digital IC design; forget about hysteresis curve cutoffs and resulting 'clean' abstractions of 0 and 1.