Analogue and Digital Electronics

Since the information is encoded very differently in analogue and digital electronics, the
way they process a signal is consequently very different. However, most operations that
can be performed with an analogue signal can also be performed with a digital signal but
in a different way.The first electronic devices invented and mass produced were analogue. However, as time passed, digital circuits have become predominant in electronics. It is important to note that analogue and digital devices are the same, the only difference is the way they
represent and process information. The same basic components can be used for analogue
or digital circuits.


Because the way information is encoded in analogue circuits, they are much more
susceptible to noise than digital circuits, since a small change in the signal can represent a
significant change in the information present in the signal and can cause the information
present to be lost, corrupted or otherwise made useless. In digital electronics, because the
information is quantized, as long as the signal stays inside a range of values, it represents
the same information. This is one of the main reasons that digital electronic circuits are
predominant. In fact, digital circuits use this principle to regenerate the signal at each
logic gate, lessening or removing noise.


Speed: This is where analogue electronics really outshines digital electronics. Analogue
circuits are several times faster than their digital counterparts. Depending on the
operation, analogue circuits can be several hundreds or hundreds of thousands of times
faster than digital circuits. This is because information in digital circuits is represented by
bits, while in analogue electronics it is represented by a property of the signal itself. For
example, transmitting a value digitally may require sending 64 bits in succession. The
same signal in analogue electronics could easily be represented by a voltage, and
transmitting that voltage takes the same time to transmit one bit, so the analogue signal in
this case is at least 64 times faster than digital.


Design Difficulty: Digital systems are much easier and smaller to design than
comparable analogue circuits. This is one of the main reasons why digital systems are
more common than analogue. An analogue circuit must be designed by hand, and the
process is much less automated than for digital systems. Also, because the smaller the
integrated circuit (chip) the cheaper it is, and digital systems are much smaller than
analogue, digital is cheaper to manufacture.