Energy-Efficient Analog Design
Energy-efficient analog design has become a critical discipline as electronic devices increasingly operate from batteries, harvest energy from the environment, or must minimize thermal dissipation. While digital circuits have benefited from decades of optimization through technology scaling and architectural innovations, analog circuits present unique challenges: they must maintain signal integrity, noise performance, and linearity while reducing power consumption to microwatts or even nanowatts in extreme applications.
The fundamental tradeoffs between power, speed, and accuracy in analog circuits require designers to employ sophisticated techniques spanning circuit topology, device operation, and system architecture. From subthreshold biasing that operates transistors at currents far below their threshold to adiabatic logic that recycles energy rather than dissipating it as heat, energy-efficient analog design draws on deep understanding of device physics, circuit theory, and application requirements to achieve performance levels that would have seemed impossible just decades ago.