Mid-20th century industrial design icons Charles and Ray Eames noted that measuring the weight of honey on a gradual scale is analog whereas counting sugar cubes in discrete units is digital. They likened analog to broad jump where manifestations of performance are measured along a continuous range. And they likened digital to high jump where performance is evaluated against a preset threshold. At that time, analog and digital had already brought about two seperate approaches to electronic computing.

Today, analog is a well-understood, yet underutilized computing paradigm next to the ubiquitous digital and the infant quantum paradigms. Digital computing, well suited for algorithmic symbol processing in discrete steps, is less suited to model continuous relationships efficiently. Today's urgent challenges in new energy research, public health, economic modelling and elsewhere, however, require precisely the modelling of continuous relationships. Analog computing is ideally suited to address these challenges with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

Once seen as an alternative to digital, analog can complement digital in analog-digital hybrid computers. This offers a path to accelerate computing beyond the impending end of Moore's Law. To this day, however, the enormous potential of hybrid computing remains largely untapped.

At anabrid, we are designing an analog computer on-a-chip. Its integration into digital computers will yield powerful, general-purpose and special-purpose hybrids of the two computational paradigms. Incorporating thousands of analog computing elements operated at scale under digital control, anabrid's analog computer on-a-chip will complement digital technology – combining the benefits of both to compute more, faster, and cheaper.