| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why is the 741 op amp still produced? |
| << < (11/24) > >> |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on September 22, 2020, 09:58:59 am --- --- Quote from: coppice on September 21, 2020, 10:00:41 pm --- However, if you ask someone at TI to recommend a simple low performance cheap op-amp they'll probably recommend an LMV321, or an LMV324 is you need several amps. Note than the LM321 is about as old as the 741, but most people use the more flexible LMV321 derivative these days. Nobody recommends a 741 any more, but a lot are still used in equipment whose design hasn't changed for decades. --- End quote --- How is the LMV321 more flexible, than the old LM321? It has some advantages: lower power consumption, bias currents and a rail-to-rail output, but the fact it only works up to 5.5V, rather than 30V, severely limits its applications, making it inflexible compared to the old LM321. --- End quote --- The supply voltage limitation hardly limits it at all in practice. In most modern designs people aren't looking to operate from 32V. They are looking to get great results from a 3V to 5V supply. The LM321 says it operates from 3V to 32V, but at 3V its performance is terrible. The LMV321 is described as rail-to-rail, which is always a bogus description, but it gets reasonably close. One of the things you have to watch out for with the LMV32x is that they are generic part, available from many suppliers, but some are closer to rail-to-rail than others. If you want flexibility in sourcing parts you need to ensure your design can work with the worst of them. |
| free_electron:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on September 20, 2020, 06:17:08 pm --- We can thank the audiophiles for that. Of course, they're not really after better audio quality when they use tubes, they're after making it sound like the way they remembered it back in the day. --- End quote --- like when they were 30 years younger and their hearing was better than now ... |
| TimFox:
Everybody agrees that the music in the 1960s was better than what followed--probably because of the Allen-Bradley carbon composition resistors. |
| Doctorandus_P:
Somewhat related to this: The Allwinner A10 (or was it the A13) is a now obsolete microprocessor. Olimex is an (apperently decent sized) customer of those chips, and they have customers who use them in industrial boards. I.E. Tested & verified, long term planning and such. On the Olimex website there is a long blog post about Alwinner re-starting the factory for those chips for a batch of 50.000 special delivery to Olimex. I do not know what the normal lifespan of a set of masks is. Did they dust of old masks for this, or just made new ones because they wear out after 50.000 chips? |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: Doctorandus_P on September 22, 2020, 01:20:20 pm ---Somewhat related to this: The Allwinner A10 (or was it the A13) is a now obsolete microprocessor. Olimex is an (apperently decent sized) customer of those chips, and they have customers who use them in industrial boards. I.E. Tested & verified, long term planning and such. On the Olimex website there is a long blog post about Alwinner re-starting the factory for those chips for a batch of 50.000 special delivery to Olimex. I do not know what the normal lifespan of a set of masks is. Did they dust of old masks for this, or just made new ones because they wear out after 50.000 chips? --- End quote --- Only a very young and naive engineer, or an idiot, puts a semiconductor device into an industrial application without checking its life status..... unless its truly a one off project. Most industrial stuff stays in production for years, while most complex consumer parts appear and disappear at random, according to how well high volume purchases are going. 50k parts is a very small run. The masks, processes, packing and test facilities are almost certainly still available. The device isn't that old. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |