Whar? Break with 35 years of tradition? Back in 1972, TI took an
order for a combined counter and 7-segment display driver chip,
quoting six weeks delivery, so I laid out the printed circuit board
and got it made.
It turned out that the data sheet didn't generate enough orders, so
they never made the part at all ...
A few years later, when I had to create company data sheets so that
my employers could buy nomimally equivant parts from various
manufacturers, I noticed that TI data sheets for nominally industry
standard parts failed to specify some paramaters that other
manufacturers did specify, or specified them more loosely, which
didn't make feel any better about TI.
Around ten years ago, I suppressed my prejudice and designed in a TI
TLC2201 op amp.
It's a nice part, but it uses big MOSFET input transistors to give
relatively low input noise, so the input capacitance is relatively
high for an op amp at some 15pF, compared with a couple of pF in a
typical part.
This isn't mentioned anywhere in the data sheet, and when it screwed
up my circuit, the TI rep didn't have clue what the input
capacitance was
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tlc2201.pdf
The modern datasheet still doesn't give a value for the input
capacitance, though it now includes a spice model of the part, where
the input capacitance should be implicitly specified in the model
used for the two MOSFET's at the input.
It did take them a while, and it sounds as if the current problem
with Burr-Brown parts is not that TI has screwed up the parts, but
that they've failed to maintain the Burr-Brown test gear so that
they can't prove that current production still meets the old
Burr-Brown specfications.
