Rational Question: Analog Electronic Chip

--- You earlier stated that:

"What I am talking about is a storage device consisting of a purely- analog electronic chip that does not use sampling or quantization. Just analog signals similar to the telephone audio used in the

If you store charge [DC] with an amplitude and polarity which corresponds to the instantaneous input AC, then you will have to sample, so the short answer to your question is: "It can't be done."

-- JF

So-called "bucket brigade" delay line devices are essentially chains of capacitors on the chip. However, although the capacitors store analog voltages, they still must operate in discrete time: There is a clock signal that tells the array when the voltage on each capacitor should be transferred to the next in the chain, and a new voltage accepted from the input. So while this is a truly analog device, you still have all the Nyquist sampling issues. And although you don't have quantization noise, it turns out that these chips are/were intrinsically pretty noisy anyway. Completely digital methods pretty much beat these guys.

However, I believe that the CCD devices in digital cameras are essentially the same thing, and they seem to be doing all right!

Best regards,

Bob Masta D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Radium is a classic troll, nothing more, nothing less. He does what he does for amusement. The longer he can spin this out, the more his infantile crippled ego will be gratified.

He reminds me very much of an infant who thinks himself very clever for having retrieved some feces from his diaper and smeared them all over his nursery, and it is for that reason that I suspect that he has fairly pronounced mental health and/or developmental issues.

CCD are in essence analog storage devices. The amount of charge that is (temporarily) stored on a gate is not digital. It can have any level inside a wide dynamic range. Most of today's CCD generate that electrical charge from light and are image sensors. There also used to be CCD delay lines and maybe some are still around in the marketplace.

Then again a software engineer once claimed that everything is digital or at least quantized since Max Planck found out about that :-)

Is there any workaround so that sampling won't be necessary?

CCDs are used for video. Are there any audio equivalents of CCDs?

Okay so sampling is a *must*. But can this sampling be done without using PAM, PWM, or any carrier waves? Can't the charges be sampled in the capacitors without adding any sort of modulation to them?

There used to be but the last time I saw one was in the early 80's. They were mostly employed as delay lines. Then came CCD delay lines for line storage in color TVs but IMHO the industry designers did not understand multipath cancelling techniques well (to get rid of image ghosting when you have poor antenna reception). So those have probably vanished as well.

Nowadays that doesn't make much sense as a product because you can do audio processing with DSP and even some uC. Also, digital memory chips are cheap compared to those back in the 80's. Once I investigated whether it would make sense to build an ultrasound beamformer around CCD but got cold feet when looking at the rather bleak market outlook for those devices.

One of the companies I remember from my CCD days is Walmsley Electronics in Scotland. No idea if they are still around.

yes.

Bye. Jasen