Re: Datasheet-flation?

Not just datasheets, but app notes and textbooks as well. They were all far, far clearer and better-written decades ago compared with today. I suspect it's perhaps due to the schools not teaching formal English grammar any more.

My experience is similar - these are usually written in cookbook form, and there must be a recipe for every possible use. It can be just about impossible to find the principles of operation documented in a coherent way. Even if badly written, it would still beat the immense cookbook approach.

In some cases (networking comes to mind), the vendors have immense documentation bases, large enough that it's physically impossible to be fully expert in more than one vendor's product line.

Joe Gwinn

In my country people would ask why are you putting decimal comma in a number that is supposed to be an integer?

Size depends on complexity of the processor, on what is included (Chinese makers tends to have short datasheets which frequently skip useful information) and style of presentation. I recently feched Intel datasheet giving essentually the instruction set, it is more than 5000 pages. Several STM datasheet for relatively simple processors have more than 1000 pages. Some STM datasheets contain a lot of examples in C, that adds bulk. STM has general timer design which can be specialized to remove various features. Instead of describing general design and then specifying features of each timer they have separate section for each compbination of features present in a timer. This leads to significant duplication, where bulk of a section is the same as section for another timer, but some places differ.

IIRC have a datasheet with about 5000 pages. 16000 pages would be reasonable if the processor contains a lot of features and they want to describe it in depth. Or could be just mistuned text-generator which is spitting text based on some templates and a database.

The grammar is occasionally bad, but the technical content is worse.

I'm thinking that designers must be kept designing, so data sheet writers and app engineers are not designers, and are directed to minimally annoy them.

I just got a good, fast response from TI, about over-driving the input of an ADS7052 ADC. I expected them to say "don't exceed the abs max input voltage of Vcc+0.3" but I got a more intelligent response. I was shocked.

In past times all sorts of chips would get weird if you pumped a little current into their ESD diodes, or latched up and fried, but that is rare now, thank Goodness.

I suggest you switch to a RISC processor. Fewer instructions implies that there might be fewer pages of documentation. Let's see if that works.

The RISC-V instruction set manual is 238 PDF pages:

Nobody RTFM's the entire manual. You're not expected to read and understand everything, just the part that is useful for whatever you're doing. I have numerous books where I've only read a few relevant chapters, skimmed a few others, and ignored the rest. When you lookup a telephone number in a telephone directory, do you read the entire directory? Same with modern devices, which are often full of features that you'll never need or use.

Are there any English-speaking countries that show an integer as

It's a convention used in banking and accountancy to divide the '0's into groups of three and make them easier to count with less chance of error. It is also used by newspapers and sometimes in ordinary correspondence but very rarely in scientific communications, where the

Also be aware that the term "Billion" means a million million (Bi-million) in English but only a thousand million in American and French.. Most English people seem ignorant of this and use it incorrectly with the American meaning.

True. In IEEE computer standards such as 1003.1 (POSIX/Linux), the word billion is not used, replaced by a thousand million. In related documents, I usually also say something like "billion (10^9)" to be precise.

Joe Gwinn

Units, thousands, millions, billions, trillions makes sense. 1000:1 steps.

Unless you mean national debts, where quadrillions are the next step.

I'd use metric prefixes. So 10^9 is 1G and 10^12 is 1T. I even wrote a desktop calculator program styled after Unix's 'dc' that uses that notation.

Jeroen Belleman

Probably not. Having to print the data sheets and bind them into books and get customers to find shelf space for those books imposed a discipline that isn't there any more.

Formal English grammar is a gross over-simplification of language structure. Machine translation didn't work until computers could handle huge sample of real language and access the actual examples they needed.

The Milliard is English for a thousand million, which Americans call a "Billion".

Logically the English runs:

No, that's a duck.

AFAIK in my country (Poland) this is an official format. But I do not remember seeing it in real life. I an not saying that I newer saw it, simply if I saw it it was rare enough that I do not remember.

This is an international place, and assumption that people who read it speak English is unwarranted. There are folks that manage to read and write something resembling English but they can not speak it. However, the point is that writing commas in numbers invites confusion (commas are too overloaded), especially since 16 looks like much more likely number.

BTW: When needing to speparate digits I normally use underscores. That seem to minimize chance of confusion.

What goes "Quick! Quick!" ? |

A duck with hiccups.

(It will soon be Christmas cracker time.)

Some towns start street addresses at 10000. Our cabin is at 12076 Some Lane.

People don't seem to use commas for that.

Wonderful birds. It's unfortunate that they taste so good.

If you design electronics in Poland, you are pretty much stuck with having to read datasheets in American English.

I wonder if anything like Google Translate can make sensible translations of data sheets.

Do people in Poland code processors or FPGAs in Polish? I suspect not.

Does LT Spice have language versions?

I think the world is trending towards AE as a universal second language.

It's German actually. And the English and American "billion" was harmonised many years ago at one thousand million so there's no confusion.