Touchstone Semi?

For their breadth of products, they're exceptionally good. Of course, if they're missing anything they just buy the company. ;-)

I don't even bother with their web site anymore, unless it's to get a datasheet and I already know the part number. The local FAE is far more user friendly, and he buys lunch. ADI is no different, really.

I only have one LTC chip in the running. Their stuff is too expensive and this case really isn't any different. They're about twice the chip cost of the cheapest alternative but when the whole BOM is considered, it's not *that* bad. Good grief, the money is in making inductors!

Not "linear"? This is highly linear and not really an RF part. It's a precision phase and amplitude-ratio detector that works down to close to DC where I'll use it. In the 80's a TI log amp was used at my employer but then it was suddenly discontinued "Texan style".

Web designers of today often don't have much of a clue. Many seem to be the kids of the script kiddies.

I've done it ones, at NXP, and it made a major difference. They revamped their site completely. But that was only after I wrote to the CEO. I did it mainly because Philips was very good to me a long time ago and wanted to help them. When I see other companies with screwed-up web site I just move on.

I don't think it's that bad, the parametric selection tools are pretty good IMO. One of the few sites that can display a table of 30 parameters full width. Instead of a stupid little big fonts scrollable window confined to 1/4 of my screen real estate. ADI have seen the light there recently too I see.

That's cool, but only for larger companies. As a consultant or smaller company you often don't get such treatment. Only the smarter manufacturers recognize how much clout a consultant has in making design-in decisions (that are usually final).

My design currently in the works has four LTC switches. Meaning all the switchers :-)

Not anymore, not sind Chinese mfgs such as XFMRS showed up. They overnight me free samples, their prices for custom are sometimes lower than catalog parts.

Usually I first give a chance to domestic mfgs and there I was repeatedly surprised. Like when I needed a special flyback with odd shape and a high-sat ferrite. It hadly cost more than the LTC driver chip, low single digit Dollars. That pleasantly surprised me, we did not have to source it in Asia.

Oh, and on another inductor project, Wuerth did buy me lunch. They know what consultants can do :-)

It totally breaks up on my screen and is slow like a snail.

I always tell marketeers to look at ON Semi's site. That's how it's done right.

For, say, opamps, there should be a few key selection parameters you can tick, then it should display a bunch of pages that have a brief summary of the parts that qualify, similar to leafing through a printed data bool and looking at the first page of each part's data; display the features and summary specs for each. The huge horizontal scrolling thing is always slow and hard to use, and you have to download a zillion PDFs to get past the 1-line summary of the parts.

The "application" orientation is annoying. What if a part doesn't fit into thwir narrow view of the world by market? Somebody's web site lumps opamps by "high speed" "low power" and "precision", but doesn't include "ordinary" or "cheap."

The worst web sites show you the part numbers and make you download PDFs for a part to just see what it is.

Yes that's pretty good. Not exactly leading edge stuff though? I usually seem to find something better/cheaper somewhere else. They won one here with MC33272A recently. (I am sure they will be over the moon with the

LTC took me to lunch last week! First time that has happened to me (actual semi manufacturer reps). Me being the aforementioned smaller company/consultant type.

worries about discontinuing parts, face it, they're still making products pushing 45 years of legacy!

Staying away from TI takes dedication these days.

For awhile there, Motorola made some apparently nice low noise op amps with, like, 22 pF of input capacitance. Fortunately they at least had the honesty to include a "phase margin vs. feedback resistance" plot quietly near the bottom.

Then there is the low noise op amp "let's cut the noise plot off below the nasty noise peak" trick. Not only chopamps, either, viz. the notorious LT1028 datasheet--a 100 MHz op amp whose noise plot cuts off at 100 kHzish, conveniently disguising noise peaks at 300 kHz and (as someone here pointed out last time) about 2.5 MHz.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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each.

have

thwir

Octopart and Digikey are pretty helpful in most cases, IME. I normally only have to go trawl the mfgs' sites for real niche stuff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

the

each.

have

Not just annoying, it's stupid. Worse is when they group them into internal name brand series like "Excalibur" and you have to know if an opamp runs under that sub-brand or not. Not sure if they still do that, since I won't use the TI web site anymore unless I absolutely have to. Which will ultimately result in lost business for them. Screwing up a web site has consequences.

The worst are where they simply slapped the whole big catalog into a gigantic PDF file and you have to download them whole thing in order to look at anything. When at an airport with limited Internet bandwidth I simply abort that download and move on.

On has some real jewels in their line up, like the NL37WZ. John Larkin pointed me to that one, you can do a lot of analog pulse stuff with it, and blazingly fast. Oh, and for 15 cents a pop which even buys you a

tick,

parts

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each.

have

"cheap."

I kind of like the big "product selection guide" things. Especially if the rep drops off a hardcopy.

When at an airport, head for the bar!

Really, the web site of any of these companies isn't of much use to me because they don't give prices. It's all quoted out of the home office, somewhere, so any published lists are useless. Without prices, the rest of the information is pretty useless, particularly for opamps and such.

LTC is a rarity, here. Too expensive. It looks like they're trying to get back in the game, though.

XFMRS is a privately held US company. We're often spending more for the inductors in a power supply than the controller.

Wurth is another company that isn't wurth calling. ;-)

Nice amp: fast, high voltage, lots of swing.

Check out TCA0372 !

(Anybody catch the error in Fig 1?)

"high

"cheap."

I have a file system for those but being lazy I don't use it often, the web is just more practical.

Depends on the airport. Las Vegas has an Irish pub at gate C1. Yumm! Franfurt has a nice open bar at the Z-gates, with Hefeweizen on tap and nice big meat sandwiches (not recommended by the surgeon general). And of course, Houston has Bubba's for that big stein of Shiners :-)

That's true, have used that sort of thing but for analog. I was thinking more of the "precision analog" side of things. I will look around there a bit more.

That's what findchips.com is for :-)

I find their switcher chips to be rather cutting edge most of the time. Although some do have shortcomings such as a missing leading edge blanking feature which is always a bit non-plussing.

I think their production is in Hong Kong though. What I really like about them is this:

There I disagree. They have stepped up to the plate many times for me, delivered a part others couldn't.