The TI e2e "support" forum thing is a nightmare. Just thought I'd say so.
I've seldom seen such bad web page design. And they do all they can to keep people from posting questions.
If it's an old Burr-Brown part, they don't know anything about it anyhow.
Burr Brown...hmm, didn't he play for the '92 Packers?
They typically take three or five rounds of back-and-forth to mostly answer a query, regardless of how specific and direct you are.
I suspect it's policy. If not by explicit direction, then by using the cheapest "engineers" they can use to fill those spots. Same outcome.
In any case, it's typically a week before you get a useful response. Factor that in to your design process!
Tim
My experience....
They have an A/D convertor that we used for years and all of the sudden it does not work in our product. We got screen shots of their EOC (end of con version) signal going out of spec by twice the stated maximum time. Had to post this on their forum to get their attention. After many back and fort hs (where they try to prove you are doing it all wrong) they finally asked us to send them the bad part. We did. We waited. We contacted them. the y lost it. They found it. They tested it. It was OK. Then we showed them they tested it wrong. then they saw it was bad. Then they tried to tell us to redo our design (The one that has been going for 20 years). Then the y just faded away. So here we are several months later working on a replac ement part, which ironically TI has , but our quality guys would not let us drop in the replacement part until we did a "root cause analysis"***
*** root cause analysis is code word for management getting to be arbitrary on when to fix a problem, because you can never really get to the root cau se of any problem if you want to be anal
Did you chant the Five Whys ceremony?
Did you perform all of the The Eight Disciplines rituals?
Did you PFMEA and MRB? Did you wave enough SPC Control Charts over the body of the dead part?
er
tor
When I need a technical question answered about a part, I contact the local FAE. I had an issue with an FPGA where I was using the 3.3 volt version a nd had a bit stream for it, but needed to program the 1.2 volt version whic h should have been bit stream identical other than possibly some header inf o. I contacted support from the FPGA company and repeatedly was told the o nly way possible was to recompile the 8 year old sources. Since the softwa re had updated revisions many times I had little expectation it would produ ce the identical bit stream and so would not required repeating qualificati on testing.
I contacted the FAE and was told that while he couldn't guaranty anything, the two chips were actually the same die and had a bond wire to switch the internal LDO in or out. Knowing that I started digging and found that I co uld manually edit, not even the bit stream file, but the setup file for the programming tool that told it what part to expect. This was perfect and a llowed me to use the now *much* cheaper 1.2 volt part in place of the ever increasing priced 3.3 volt part.
Rick C.
If you just buy TI brand LM324s you'll find them very reliable
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