I actually worked for a startup that makes tiny FPAA's (Field Programmable Analog Arrays) for the low powered battery market. Their major appeal was that you could reprogram the chip to synthesize a real analog network to offload the signal processing portion of your product for a tiny fraction of the power cost.
The key thing is that analog components are influenced much more by environmental fluctuations (think temperature, pressure, and manufacturing), which impacts the "compute" of an analog network. Their novelty was that the chip can be "trimmed" to offset these impacts using floating gate MOSFETs, the same that are used in flash memory, as an analog offset. It works surprisingly well, and I suspect if they can capture the low power market we'll see a revitalization of analog compute in the embedded space. It would be really exciting to see this enter the high bandwidth control system world!
The key thing is that analog components are influenced much more by environmental fluctuations (think temperature, pressure, and manufacturing), which impacts the "compute" of an analog network. Their novelty was that the chip can be "trimmed" to offset these impacts using floating gate MOSFETs, the same that are used in flash memory, as an analog offset. It works surprisingly well, and I suspect if they can capture the low power market we'll see a revitalization of analog compute in the embedded space. It would be really exciting to see this enter the high bandwidth control system world!