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I always wondered why digital signaling is always purported to be better than analog when analog can always carry much more data than digital. But maybe noise elimination of digital signaling is just too important.


Digital simplifies the design a great deal. Analog you have to worry about so, so many things. With digital, as long as the levels aren't too out of whack, you can "just" focus on the theoretical logic and ignore most real-world effects.

I say "just" not only because the theoretical logic is still fiendishly complex, but also because there are still real-world effects and flaws in your components which both rear their ugly head often (all abstractions are leaky). You can never completely ignore the analog world, but digital design is almost always much, much simpler than analog for anything beyond rudimentary levels of complexity.

Obviously if you're designing the silicon for digital components, you care very much about the analog reality of signals. But those silicon wizards are the ones who are building the digital abstraction of the analog world so that the rest of us can "safely" ignore it, mostly.


Digital allows simple and easy reasoning and logic. Which allows perfect duplication, checksumming, repeating, etc.

Something impossible to do with analog, due to the processing model.

Digital is built on analog primitives of course.




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