TI Analog Design Journal

They'd be more valuable if the TI Marketing department hadn't been quite so enthusiastic about leaving out important facts that might discourage people from buying TI parts. I got bitten early on, and tried to avoid them. They did introduce some nice parts, and at least in one case I got bitten again by the crucial information they'd left out of the data sheet.

Thanks. There are a few cool things there.

The active clamp, that looks like the idea floated here some years ago by Genome He disappeared shortly after.

Cheers

As part of my first industrial job I had to write company standard data sheets so we could buy low end op amps from different manufacturers.

I end up freezing out TI for some parts because their data sheets failed to guarantee crucial performance parameters. Their parts mostly worked, but they clearly didn't test them, and we would have had no comeback if some of them hadn't worked. A cheap part stops being cheap if you have to rip it out and replace it to get the performance that you promised.

It wasn't back then. Test gear costs money, and high-throughput test gear is even more expensive.

Even Linear Technology had items on their data sheets marked "guaranteed by design - not tested".

No. That would be incredibly difficult and expensive.

Parts are amazingly good nowadays, if you buy them from dependable suppliers, like TI.

Actually, we recently had some products fail in final test because some SSRs had unexpected off leakage. Only a per cent or so of SSRs had the high leakage... definitely two categories, pA or nA leakages.

We had to de-reel the parts and test them by hand, and keep a bin full of tested parts around. When a channel fails automated test, we replace all the SSRs in that channel.

We could have built boards from all tested parts, but we'd have to de-reel, test, and re-reel the parts, which could be done if the failure rate were higher.

Possibly the pick-and-place could pick up loose tested parts from a tray so we wouldn't have to re-reel.

Even TI has their problem parts now and then

boB