[formerly_proven]

The reasoning laid out in the article boils down to: Analog doesn't compose.

There is no fundamental element in the real world that you can combine to build arbitrary analog circuits, while you can do just that with digital circuits.

[pjc50]

You can kinda-sorta compose things out of op-amps, and people did, but for almost all practical purposes the best thing to do is to wire the input straight into an ADC and do all your computation in the digital domain.

[diydsp]

yeah pretty much. programmable digital is already niche and it's made of the same types of components repeated: NAND gates.... or similar combined into cells... analog circuits generally have much higher diversity of components.... caps, resistors, and inductors can easily vary 1e3 to 1e6 times in size. component interconnects are more more diverse... e.g. where digital is usually a flow of data from on port to another, analog has many more feedback points.

Another issue is that analog is typically used in media where they can interfere with other systems if misconfigured. e.g. radio systems or other networks. whereas digital can more or less apply to system like math or seraching or database, where errors won't throw everyon eelse of the network.

These aren't unsolvable problems, but they probably mean poor utilization of space on a die. and since like I said, programmmable digital is inefficient enough, analog will be less so. :(

That being said, there are some possibly applications where I'd like to see analog such as motor controllers and SEPIC regulators. Advantages here would be less RF, less CPU power, and less time programming precise timing.

[gnramires]

OPamps, resistors, (switched) capacitors (and optionally inductors, although I believe they're infeasible to integrate) provide universal linear elements allowing the (approximate) reproduction of any linear system. Usually analog stages are linear, so that's not a huge issue. The key here is approximate: in reality, analog systems are precision-critical, have demands like low noise and subtle nonlinearities that apparently (per the article) make integration of an analog network not so attractive (because you can't control those parameters so easily).

[simne]

You are very close to truth.

In reality, analog precision is not scaled.

Really easy achieve 8-10 bits, even 12 bits, but 16 bits or more are hard.

For example, now manufacturers use large matrices with lot of spare parts, and before put chip in case, it's precision measured and cut metal seals, so made very precise parameters.

So in reality, modern analog chips ARE one time programmable analog, but one time analog programming is cheap enough but rewritable are inadequate expensive.