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| Is the 555 still a viable IC? |
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| schmitt trigger:
I originally posted this question on another EE forum, but I believe that the technical expertise and the geographic distribution of members is significantly different between the two, to warrant posting it again here. DISCLAIMER: I am not building anything with a 555, this question is only sheer curiosity..... Having cleared that out of the way: It can be safely said that the 555 is one of the most ubiquitous and influential ICs in history. I am also sure that most if not all of the old-time forum members have used it at least once. But the IC is almost 52 years old, and although it has been updated to CMOS versions, its age and limitations show up. The question would be: do you think that the 555 is still a viable IC in 2024? Let me give my personal opinion; the problem with the 555 are the required external passive components. To obtain a modicum of stability and accuracy, the cost of those components may exceed the cost of the IC itself. |
| tooki:
Define “viable”. Because clearly it’s a viable product, in that the manufacturers can manufacture them at a cost low enough that customers are still buying them in volumes sufficient to keep production going, but with a sale price that makes it worthwhile. (The sales number always thrown around is “over 1 billion per year”.) They ceased being sensible as accurate timers long ago. If they ever were to begin with. But clearly they’re being used for something. |
| MarkS:
Depends on your use case. If you need accuracy, no. If close enough is good enough, yes. What you'll find is that 99% of the time, "close enough" is perfect. |
| schmitt trigger:
You are correct, "viable" is a very elastic word. Its meaning can be stretched in a number of ways. By viable, as a narrow definition, I was thinking whether it could still find a place on low to medium volume commercial products. Nowadays, in 2024. High volume I believe is out of the question, whatever function the 555 can do, it could be integrated somewhere else. Yet, they still sell..... Who would be the potential customers? As previously mentioned, this is only curiosity. |
| exe:
Ha-ha, did same research ago. There are plenty of threads like this on the Internet. As of me, I used it to generate square pulses to drive a mosfet. It worked flawlessly, can't complain. I used CMOS-version of time because it's presumably less noisy. I decided not to go with MCU as I didn't want to mess up with firmware and programming. The only thing I didn't really like is that, in order to get less than 50% duty cycle, I had to use some "wizardy" with a diode. |
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