An amusing aside: Look at the list of "applications." Netbooks? Multichannel video transcoders? Scalable platforms?

I've seen this in other TI datasheets. One old general purpose 74HC series logic chip included "E Meters" in its applications.

My hunch is that whoever was assigned to add these "applications" to each data sheet was having some harmless fun.

Another note is that I'm a low profile customer of Digi-Key and Mouser. Both of them send out change notifications on parts that I've ordered in the past.

This is the electronics equivalent of Python3's breaking changes to string handling. It's pure evil, and will have 2nd order effects for decades.

How were they python 3 changes pure evil? I think it was a good thing for the language in the long run, and the earlier you do it, the better.

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.

Kind of.

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.

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.

Kind of like keeping a certain plane model number the same, and claiming that re-training isn't needed even when it clearly is

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.

1: https://youtu.be/22ZmmZ67SMY

MPF102 is my favourite there.

“It’s a JFET” is your only guarantee.

Buy binned parts and design spec spread into it.

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.

> The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test.

Is this backed up by court precedent? This seems like you could easily claim damages due to a differently speccd part.

I’m not doubting that’s how the industry operates, but it seems wrong so I’m curious what is supporting such a dysfunctional form of doing business.

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”

I got one of those take down notices because I had their catalog of Space Grade Rad Hard parts on my website. About six directory levels down; did I give TI permission to invade my site?. Any Human would have seen it as promoting their parts, which was not the direct intention. The Bot just said it was a Copyright violation and I had to remove it from my site or they would send lawyers after me. It wasn't worth the time to fight.

I've been screwed by TI many times in one way or other. As have colleagues. They did a die-change of a MSP430 and it stopped working in their product. No answer was forthcoming from TI.

I had designed in a Silicon Labs Bluetooth module a few years ago. Now that TI has bought SiLabs, I'm designing it out. I simply don't trust TI. They once were a good company. They went downhill fast after they got rid of all of the support people and moved support online via forums.

Why do companies always do this? Always the largest companies with all the money to quietly host what at most a couple hundred mb of data and they just don't. Kill the old download links. Ruin all the old support articles that point to those old download links. Ruin all the old forum posts that point there. What is even crazier is sometimes they still have the files they just don't expose them, they make you beg for them with the support agent from across the world who asks if you have tried unplugging the thing first when you ask for the download you know you already want. Infuriating, boring dystopia.

Because they're changing out their backend CMS and have deemed it too expensive to port ask three old documentation over.

Oh, wow, I was expecting from the title that, eh, maybe they changed the process or something, and someone was being a bit fussy. But yeah, no, different part.

Across the board TI is moving to new fabs, new fab processes and 300 mm wafers. So the old tooling is going away and they're adapting legacy designs to the new processes. This changes component behavior, particularly analog stuff, like these op amps.

That's all inevitable and has happened in the semiconductor business before. When it happens, manufacturers are forced to choose; obsolete old parts that can't be indistinguishably reproduced on the new node, or and sell substantially different components under existing SKUs, so they can keep booking orders from high volume customers without disruption.

In this case, the latter is happening. In all probability their high volume customers have already accounted for the PCN because TI told them it was coming years ago, back when the new fab buildout started and the lithography machines were first ordered.

> so they can keep booking orders from high volume customers without disruption.

Clearly there is disruption though. It's more a matter of whether or not it's openly acknowledged.

There's no reason it isn't as the die is likely the same just in a different package.

This is fucking dire. Lowering voltage will just lead to early failures for poor clueless designers/repairmen that had old datasheet saved and just assume it will never change but slew rate chance is just "well it works, but suddenly it's worse in certain applications"

This is why you should always order new parts for a new design and never, never trust the old guy with the magic parts box. Also why learning to read and compare data sheets skeptically is a fundamental skill.

No, I’m talking about the guy that builds prototypes out of his magic parts box and says “oh, you can still get those” when the last direct substitute was obsoleted in 2008. Or he’s using the old version of a part like this in a “proven” subcircuit and NOT checking for change notices or other the new data sheets. That’s what I mean by the “magic parts box”. Buy new parts for new prototypes and read all the latest data, folks.