Most interesting recent products / improvements?

Meanin' lots of sloppy coding and bloat :-(

And some ultra-cheap ones lay on one spectacular pyrotechnic show when the super-cheap electrolytics in there give up.

Don't get me started. Now they banned lightbulbs, starting Tuesday. I guess that'll save 0.0001% of carbon-dioxide over there. Pathetic.

Where? My last quote was almost $2k, two (!).

Rohm and NJR are pretty good though. The English in the datasheets can be a bit rocky though, occasionally to the point where stuff becomes ambiguous.

I don't know, if he means $100-$200 per PCB, or maybe small PCBs? pcb-pool.de: 5 eurocards (160x100), 4 layers, each one for 84 Euro, but in

And using their reflow kit is nice for prototypes, because it is faster and looks better than hand soldering.

Oh, then they must have adjusted their prices. When I checked one or two years ago they were expensive compared to the places over here. Mostly I used this place:

Interesting. Especially since I just finished a design and (so far) have no idea who can solder it. It's mostly 0603 and some TSSOP pitch stuff.

In case anyone else wonder what this reflow kit is:

Hey, I guess when done we could bake a pizza for the guys in the oven :-)

Is TI the new Maxim?

John

These threads concerning bad products and worse "support" should be copied to the appropriate management.

Perhaps a new usenet group: sci.electronis.dud-products ?:-)

Nothing has come of it yet, but I am recently seeing inquiries of the form, "Can you design a replacement for this part? But fix..."

...Jim Thompson

No, then you could not even buy a reel :-)

Other than that TI has been fairly good to me. And the THS4021 opamps work like a champ. Two years and counting.

Usually gets ignored :-(

I receive the same requests but for circuit board designs. Roughly 50% of my work consist of redesign of someone else's design. Keeps food on the table so no complaints here :-)

That springy thing you use to check your oil level. Like a d**ch* nozzle, but less useful.

All those unidirectional jobs with a 245 in the part number work and are cheap. I guess that's a bad thing.

Hi, Phil:-

Check out page 16 of 20, top right paragraph:

Yikes! What a bag-o-worms.

John

Interesting drive requirements. So was this really just some 50-75 ohm [coax] level converter for some prior client?

It does say on the front page that one of the applications is: "Portable POS systems." And we know what POS may stand for.

Jon

Gotcha. 100 LSTTL unit loads.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Nah, TI has cost us a fortune. Maxim hasn't. ;-)

Even if it replaced six parts worth $12?

I know I won't get any argument about this here on SED. ;-)

BGAs haven't caused us *too* much grief. QFNs are the ones that drive us nuts. The larger Actel parts ($2.90, above) are in QFP-100s.

We do our own.

They don't for us - inventory. A reel of 5,000 1% resistors is less than $10 from DigiKey, of all places.

Not so much anymore. Actel (and ALtera, IIRC) parts are guaranteed to not need sequencing. Actel even supports hot plugging.

No FPGAs in the above. The analog circuits take about half of the above supplies.

You should work with or examine the work of those that succeed at it then.

What are the problems with BGA? I think there is no modern complex consumer device without BGAs.

Hardcore technicians can desolder and solder BGAs even by hand, without expensive equipment:

Maybe it's more complicated, if you use 0.4 mm pitch BGAs, and package-on-package PCBs:

I wonder how many stacks they can do? Building a full computer with separate CPU, flash and RAM chips with the size of a sugar cube would be nice :-)

Any good advices on QFNs?

On a sunny day (Sat, 29 Aug 2009 05:47:24 +0200) it happened Frank Buss wrote in :

Amazing!

Yeah, if at all possible, don't use 'em. Unfortunately, it's not possible. :-(