This sort of thing really annoys me. Part numbers are for use of engineers, not for the marketing dept. If you change the specs, change the part number.
I want all 7400s to be four NAND gates, regardless of how they are implemented. As long as the results are correct, you might as well put a little ARM controller pretending to be four NAND gates.
For analog parts, I agree any change to the data sheet should receive at least a different suffix letter.
In these cases of the TI parts, some of their most important specifications, like maximum supply voltage, noise and slew rate, have been changed, and not by a few percent, but by even a factor close to 2.
For so great changes, it is really not acceptable to use the same part number, especially when the part numbers have been in widespread use for many decades, so most users who are familiar to them will not bother to check again their latest specifications, where they could notice that they are no longer what they knew.
I can see both sides of this. I really want different part numbers for the same reason you do.
However we deal with a lot of regulated products and to just open a case at one of the Government Paper-Pusher Regulators will cost us $5,000 to just change the part number. We are a small company and $5k hurts.
I'm sure it does and you have my sympathies, but your situation would not be a reason to let Texas freakin' Instruments off the hook. They're not exactly "a small company", and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5k would have been cheaper than dealing with the response to this, so this just comes across as incompetence on their end.
... How do the "paper-pusher regulators" feel about getting a completely different part unannounced? I would guess unhappy, tbh. Like based on the thread it's not trivial changes.
> If you change the specs, change the part number.
They took it from SW.
You know this joke with "Windows is a single platform" ? Or the joke with "use rust if you can compile it" ? Or "your browser version is not supported" ?
It annoys me too but part numbers are not a spec but more of a strong hint. The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test. Even for a 2N2222 or whatever.
Keeping in mind, though, that this is a jellybean part. You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier, because many vendors produce "a" 5532, and they're all the same. Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
(And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs, including the 22V max input voltage. Because a design that was built for "a" 5532 was usually built to run it up to 100%; and that a vendor couldn't offer their part as a swap-in if it couldn't do that.)
But now, if your purchasing department (or the supplier they purchase from) happens to order TI 5532s — or if the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock — then your product is now broken, with no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI.
The EEVBlog[1] video about this has a nice example of only a single chinese manufacturer offering the same stuff as TI now does, even with the same PNP instead of NPN topology. All the others are comparable to the original.
> Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
That may be true for a small webshop or a brick-and-mortar electronics store (what few of those still exist). Or be true for end users / manufacturers of equipment that includes such a part.
But (afaik) that's not how it works for large reputable distributors like Mouser, Digikey & co. You don't order a generic "5532" there, you order a 5532 from <specified manucturer> there. Part from manufacturer A may, or may not be interchangeable with same-numbered part from manufacturer B. There's even some parts that have same # but very different function between manufacturers. In other words: buyers, designers do your homework.
Likewise in a design, if you specify "5532" that should read as "any manufacturer's 5532 should do". If not (or unsure / untested), one should specify the part including its manufacturer. Or a list of acceptable manufacturer/part# combo's.
Ofcourse changing the spec significantly for a jellybean part like discussed here (and one with many 2nd sources), that's just evil. Change a part like that, give it its own part #.
>You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier
This is not true.
>because many vendors produce "a" 5532
This is true, in the sense of a "5532-type part". But you will note that all the 5532 variants have different manufacturer's part numbers (prefixes and suffixes) to prevent this confusion. They don't just do that for branding.
>and they're all the same.
This is emphatically and trivially not true, and it tells me you haven't done the work of carefully comparing data sheet specs across suppliers. Try it, you'll learn something.
>Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
That might happen somewhere, but authorized distributors do not do this and volume manufacturers do not do this. You might have an internal part number with an authorized suppliers list that includes more than one variant of 5532 that has been vetted for production.
>And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs
Again, emphatically and trivially not true. Take a careful look at the NJM and On Semi data sheets. Spec by spec. Do the work and be amazed.
>the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock
Authorized distributors do not do this. It gets hairy when you're sourcing NOS from grey market dealers for old designs or in severe part crunches like 2020-2022 era, but that's a different story.
>no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI
This concept is backwards. You would have an internal part number for 5532-type op amp, and it would have an authorized vendors list that would only include vetted parts. "Any 5532 but TI" is asking for trouble from someone else.
And parts do change or get updated and if you are buying from authorized distributors for production you and your supply chain and quality people will get product change notices. At that point it's your job (or the component engineer's, if you're fortunate enough to have one) to validate the new version or find a suitable alternate.
It has worked this way since the days of the vacuum tube, so there probably is some legal precedence somewhere. I think part of this with the NE5532 is just that these days most EEs spend most of their time with digital where the data sheet and its spec is absolute; in the linear world the spec sheet is an ideal and an average because the parts themselves are an ideal and the real world never lines up with the math. Back when the NE5532 came out it was still common to see power supplies that were unregulated or barely regulated or cheap regulators with poor tolerance that would vary a fair amount with wall voltage and massive tolerances on passives, data sheets and EEs took this into account, most parts would survive max voltage but there would be a higher failure rate, so run at 70% or 80% and you don't have to worry about it.
In these days of cheap SMPS and EEs that are trained with a strong lean towards digital and much improved IC fab, the max seems to be treated as the max safe voltage for good reliability and life, and you don't have to worry much about the tolerances of everything else so much. Back in the 90s when I was learning this stuff, the old EEs scolded me when ever I ran at max voltage and would patiently explain it all to me and that even if it can operate at that voltage, you can't be certain your PS will still be putting out that voltage in a year, parts drift as they age and accidents happen and the world is not ideal. They were right.
They’re just not really standardized at all, especially semiconductors. Not in the sense you’d expect naively. Some were a long time ago, and supposedly the old Japanese sc parts were, down to die geometry and process. But otherwise, the part number means “this is like the part with a similar number first made by someone else”, not “this is an exact replacement in every way”
Specs are just that... specs. A 7400 is one thing, but if you designed a circuit that barely avoids oscillating with a 10 MHz GBW, an unsolicited "upgrade" to the opamp that raises its GBW to 12 MHz may be more of a disaster than a favor.
Frankly it's not OK to "upgrade" plain old TTL parts, either, since a faster 7400 might expose a race condition that never caused problems before, or cause EMI problems that didn't exist before.
I want all 7400s to be four NAND gates, regardless of how they are implemented. As long as the results are correct, you might as well put a little ARM controller pretending to be four NAND gates.
For analog parts, I agree any change to the data sheet should receive at least a different suffix letter.