Trends in Modern Electronic Design

The following trends occur through out electronic design, not just metal detectors.

1) There is a trend to convert what was previous done by analog means to doing it with digital means.

2) What was previously designed in special purpose components becomes designed with microprocessors.

3) The handling of analog quantities gets converted to a general design of transducer input being fed to an Analog to Digital (A/D) converter which is being read by a computer along with the computer calculating required analog quantities and outputting its results to a Digital to Analog (D/A) converter(s) to drive an output transducer(s).

4) What was previously handled by special purpose microprocessors gets designed using General Purpose Computer Hardware that is compatible to the standard PC.  This can occur even when the final product is an embedded design.  That is, even though a machines microcomputer control appears to be embedded within it as just some internal electronics, it has internally been implemented with processors compatible to the PC.

5) Wherever possible, designers are shifting design variables to being specified within the software rather than any other method.

6) There is a trend for much of the best available software to originate from the Open Source community.