u/oddlyspecificndFunny

Some might say I'm obsessed with this whole analog computing thing. But its only because I find it so interesting! For some quick background I wrote a previous introductory explainer about how computing some things in the analog domain can be far more efficient than doing so digitally. As a constant outlet for my interests, I wrote another article going through how to use this old technology for some ML-type work. I start at the transistor level, take some time to compare FGs to other technologies and go on to describe what a benchmark would look like in both the digital and analog worlds.

https://sangota.substack.com/p/analog-can-scale-heres-how

TLDR: You can get ~1000x (3 orders of magnitude) energy reduction with an accuracy within 3 points (95.5% digital vs 92.7% analog) while maintaining faster inference speed (~15uS digital vs 7uS analog) thanks to fewer levels of indirection (gate depth).
The post is also supposed to serve as a standalone educational tour of circuits covering MOSFETs, Flash technology (in SSDs), and the analog and digital circuit design process. If you're interested in learning about any of this stuff I hope this helps.

P.S. main picture is from this paper explaining how FGs can be made :)

After the last post introducing the analog/physical computing approach and how by just counting the number of transistors we see how much more efficient it can be, there was a bunch of interesting discussion around how well this could really work. So, I wrote a new article walking through the levels of abstraction from a single transistor to the MNIST benchmark video in the post explaining how an analog computing system would work or scale.

As always, I’m generally happy to answer questions about this stuff :)

There’s no shortage of interest in AI chips, systolic arrays and accelerators these days but I realized there weren’t that many discussions about alternative stacks of computing and why they can be far more efficient. So i wrote an article thats basically about counting :)

https://open.substack.com/pub/sangota/p/one-good-analog-transistor-is-worth

Essentially I think physical computing and specifically analog computing are not just intellectual curiosities or niche academic papers so I wanted to walk through an example of stuff that’s possible today while linking to far more demonstrations of what’s been done.

Happy to answer any questions!