| Abstract | Analog functions are indispensable for most electronic applications, ranging from telecom to biomedical or automotive applications. Yet, designing the analog circuits has become a large burden, especially in advanced CMOS technologies where reduced voltage headrooms and increased variability and reliability problems challenge the design of power-efficient analog circuits. Together with the lack of adequate EDA tools this also jeopardizes efficient analog circuit design. This keynote describes a possible way forward. The industry clearly has reached a bifurcation point. Many applications will leave the scaling race, and adopt older or nonstandard (e.g. flexible organic) technologies for the analog circuits, offering the increased functionality essentially through heterogeneous integration. Many other applications will stick to advanced CMOS, but will shift the analog design paradigm from analog-heavy to digital-heavy minimalistic-analog circuits. The presentation will discuss and illustrate the challenges and solutions in such approach to design analog functions without analog transistors. |