php - How do I process an associative array properly in a PDO (or MySQLi) query?

I'm using MySQLi for a project (but could easily switch to PDO, read the edit at the bottom). What I want is to be able to process an associative array into an mysql query without typing every key/value pair manually. I know that might be simply put, but I'm still in a learning process when it comes to MySQLi/PDO. To make it clear what I mean here is an example:

Let's say I have this associative array:

$data = array(
    'name' => 'Objective',
    'short_name' => 'OB',
    'generation' => 1
);

What I want is to create a query like this:

UPDATE signals SET ? = ? WHERE sid = '1'

And it to become a query like this (or instead of an UPDATE, an INSERT, SELECT etc.):

UPDATE signals SET
    name = 'Objective', 
    short_name = 'OB', 
    generation = 1 
WHERE sid = '1'

So basically my question is: is this possible with MySQLi or PDO itself? If it's possible how would I have to do this?
I've read on preparing statements before executing, but it's not getting to me yet. Hopefully someone can help me out.

Edit: I'm still very early into the project so i'm also fine with using PDO, but the same question remains. I did look into both PDO and mysqli, and I'm not sure how to do it with PDO either. So for the sake of the question i'll add PDO to as a tag and to the question.