Re: Drives me Nuts

That's one hell of a list! One very obvious thing they could do and for which there can be no legitimate objection would be to standardize the order in which a part's characteristics are listed. So you can quickly find what you want to know OTOH, or have to read through an entire datasheet just to discover that the info you need isn't within it OTO.

It's unfair to blame data sheets for your defective mental health. If you haven't got enough sense to read them carefully - and anybody who takes Russia Today seriously can't read anything carefully - your are going to find that your defective understanding of what is being said will upset you.

But he didn't provide an example data sheet. One has to suspect that the pin-out data was there but in an unusual format.

That's the free market for you.

That's an unfortunate tradition. RF designers seem to be able to live it it.

That's the free market for you. It costs money to register a standard package.

No way that John Larkin cna find.

That's the free market for you. Engineers who can design things cost money, and the marketing department doesn't like paying for their time. Interns are a lot cheaper.

It lets the marketing department hide the bad news. Texas Instruments used to leave out unattractive information when the had to pay for the paper it was printed on. Now they create very large .pdf documents to bury the bad news.

The legal department likes to think that it is useful.

Then they have to lay out the conditions necessary to let you get anywhere near that maximum rate - it tends to be situation dependent.

Not their responsibility.

As if there was only one way of washing a printed circuit board.

Only on some resistors. Some resistor data sheets have quite a lot of information on transient overload limits. I've never seen one where they explained how the transient overload messed up the resistor, let alone what might be going on.

Some of them don't need it. The cheap and nasty ceramic capacitors where the capacitance is highly voltage dependent don't sell into particularly discriminating markets

Anybody with any sense doesn't put any current into an electrolytic capacitor that might thin down the oxide layer that creates the capacitance. John Larkin should have paid more attention to his chemistry lectures.

They take the attitude that users shouldn't exceed the data sheet maximum voltage, so they don't have to spell how things can go wrong if they do.

The industry seems happy with it, for some parts. I seem to remember that some people sold high-reliablity parts with longer lives.

That's not a bug - that's a feature. That's why they are called common-mode inductors.

They should use the data sheet to warn unsophisticated users about that sort of problem, but most inductors are made for specific jobs, and they expect the users to know what they are doing.

Marketing seems to think that absolute maximum ratings which you could only obtain with liquid helium cooling are defensible.

That marketing for you.

Pollyanna optimists do read data sheets rather less carefully than they should.