Increases in signal bandwidth and data rates have prompted the development of new signal processing techniques to solve challenges associated with wideband signals. Increased signal bandwidth has also made new applications possible, including ultrawideband (UWB) technology-based active radio-frequency (RF) identification (ID) in heterogeneous environments. In addition, increasing signal bandwidth improves ranging accuracy, making wideband technologies especially attractive for radar, imaging, and other applications.
Unfortunately, fundamental scaling limits on clock speed, switching, heat dissipation, and difficulty of fault recovery make digital logic unsuitable for wideband signal processing. For example, today's DSP technology cannot process the wideband signals required for emerging applications such as high-definition TV, software-defined radio, cognitive radio, 4-G handheld services, white spaces, UWB-based services, and real-time GHz/THz medical imaging. Beyond the need for greater speed and bandwidth processing capability, methods for reducing power consumption also have huge appeal and utility in many signal processing applications. For example, a huge premium is placed on power consumption in mobile devices; high-speed DSPs are a huge drain on the battery life of cell-phones and PDAs.
For wideband applications, the Nyquist rate is in the multiple Gsps range and, hence, only relatively simple signal processing can be implemented and often requires highly pipelined and parallel processing architectures. Going forward, DSP technology is unlikely to reach the capabilities required by these applications because the limits of CMOS-based digital signal processing structures are not expanding according to Moore's Law any more. In fact, deep sub-micron CMOS gates have widths measured in molecules, suggesting that transistor sizes (and switching speeds) are nearing their fundamental limits. In other words, there is little room to increase the bandwidth processing ability of DSP technology because transistor switching speed, which is inversely related to transistor size, cannot get much faster.
Analog logic, in turn, has its own limitations. Because analog circuits are not formed of truly independent blocks, changing one block of analog logic can force changes in every other block in the circuit. In addition, advances in process technology occur so quickly that application-specific designs often become obsolete before they are fabricated. Finally, analog circuits are neither fully reconfigurable nor fully programmable.