Color in Datasheets

How about parts you can actually get, and that actually work, and "support" that actually supports, from TI?

We just celebrated the two month anniversary of our service request about the horrible THS3062 problem. After dozens of prods, to TI, the TI reps, and through the distributors, no response yet.

They did give me an automated response to my last email, assigning a service request number to my question about why they have not responded to the original service request number.

Avoid the Burr-Brown parts. TI has scrooed the pooch on that one.

John

Whar? Break with 35 years of tradition? Back in 1972, TI took an order for a combined counter and 7-segment display driver chip, quoting six weeks delivery, so I laid out the printed circuit board and got it made.

It turned out that the data sheet didn't generate enough orders, so they never made the part at all ...

A few years later, when I had to create company data sheets so that my employers could buy nomimally equivant parts from various manufacturers, I noticed that TI data sheets for nominally industry standard parts failed to specify some paramaters that other manufacturers did specify, or specified them more loosely, which didn't make feel any better about TI.

Around ten years ago, I suppressed my prejudice and designed in a TI TLC2201 op amp.

It's a nice part, but it uses big MOSFET input transistors to give relatively low input noise, so the input capacitance is relatively high for an op amp at some 15pF, compared with a couple of pF in a typical part.

This isn't mentioned anywhere in the data sheet, and when it screwed up my circuit, the TI rep didn't have clue what the input capacitance was

The modern datasheet still doesn't give a value for the input capacitance, though it now includes a spice model of the part, where the input capacitance should be implicitly specified in the model used for the two MOSFET's at the input.

It did take them a while, and it sounds as if the current problem with Burr-Brown parts is not that TI has screwed up the parts, but that they've failed to maintain the Burr-Brown test gear so that they can't prove that current production still meets the old Burr-Brown specfications.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

About five years ago Micron starting changing all their logos on their data sheets to color (blue) . Somewhere they had a little splash ad telling you that the "colorizing" was "sponsored by HP!" My interpretation was that HP paid Micron some small amount of money that they figured they'd get back in extra ink and toner sales... but the whole think seemed a bit odd, really.

It's too bad that in the data sheet you linked some of the figures (e.g., Fig.

50) were compressed with something like JPEG that makes what should be nice crisp edges somewhat blurry. The other figures don't have that problem, so it seems like an isolated faux paus and TI generally watches that sort of thing...

See _The LinCMOS Handbook_. I picked up mine in the UK about 10-12 years ago. IIRC, those big input MOSFETs are actually around 100 parallel MOSFETS per input, both input transistor bits interspersed in a single array so as to minimize Vos. In low power circuits the fb resistors tend to be large, which aggravates the issue.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Make that "The LinCMOS design manual":

It does not seem to have been distributed much, if at all, outside of Europe.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

That is a good idea! animated datasheets!!

Marc

Yeah, Flash files. With nice touchy-feelie introductions.

John

I can imagine an exploding part cartoon in the absolute specifications section. :)

What if datasheets disappear. Let's say everything has a perfect spice model. This will allow datasheets to be produced from the spice model.

One downloads an entire spice library. Then enters the desired specs. The app scans all the spice models. It then produces a spice based datasheet.

A nice way to standardize datasheet presentation.

D from BC

Grudgingly, I guess I could accept "Clippie" hopping around the datasheet if in the process, he would fix all of the typos and omissions....!! and outright "lies" in some cases :(

-mpm

...with electrons chasing the holes...

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org posted to sci.electronics.design:

More likely scrapped them before finding out that the new testers cannot duplicate the tests that B-B used.

John Larkin snipped-for-privacy@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Cool, a computer powered interactive data sheet. And you have to buy a new data sheet each month.

Robert Baer snipped-for-privacy@localnet.com posted to sci.electronics.design:

Eeeek!. D, there has been underage readers of this NG. We do not want too early recombination now do we? Also note, gold has been shown to be an effective recombination dopant.

Your comment is clearly too forward, and biased.

John

Yah... It does make the datasheet more expensive.. Somebody has to pay the datasheet decorator.. :) No problem.... Sponsored links on datasheets! :P "Digikey", "Mouser", "Tektronix", "Penis Enlargement", "Porno movies"..heck whatever pays the datasheet editor.. :P

I dunno why PDF is used for datasheets. Manufacturers could make each datasheet an interactive webpage.

D from BC

That would make them hard to save. Some of the pdf's are hard to save already. And a lot of the web pages can't be bookmarked; I guess too many people were buying chips, and they need to discourage that.

John

PDFs can be saved and the publishers knows exactly what they will look like when printed. It was the latter I think that pushed publishing in that format initially. The figure on page 3 stays on page 3.

Web pages are ephemeral and close to impossible to archive locally.

Printed output varies considerably. Not a big problem if designed properly but they are oh so rarely designed properly.

Robert

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A web datasheet could have printing and save options.

D from BC

It's already hard enough to do that now.

--
  Keith