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Best and Worst Component Manufacturers

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IDEngineer:
There is a thread on here regarding an SMPS controller with a lockup mode. A subthread within has been bringing up component vendors that folks love and hate. I thought it might be useful to have a thread dedicated to the topic of Best and Worst component manufacturers.

I'll start by offering a short list, to which I may add later:

GOOD: Microchip. I know they get razzed a bit but I've found their MCU's to work very well. Their analog parts aren't the fastest/etc. but I've had good luck with their jellybean opamps, comparators, and VReg's. Their CAN PHY chips have worked well for me too. Personally, I find their spec sheets and app notes very readable and understandable. And I want to give a big shout out to their technical support... most (not all) of my tickets have been quickly answered, and in one case they set up a conference call with at least half a dozen chip engineers and app engineers that spent at least an hour with me on the phone coming up with solutions.

GOOD: Alpha and Omega. This is actually the one that made me think of starting this thread, because someone on the other thread said they'd never heard of AO. Not sure of their history but I've used their discrete transistors and smaller analog IC's with no problems.

QUESTIONABLE: Virtually every MLCC vendor. My biggest complaint is the inconsistency in their spec sheets. Pick a vendor... some spec sheets will include every parameter and variable you could want, while others will be outright missing things like the graph for capacitance vs. DC bias percentage (very important for MLCC's). I learned this painful lesson due to the industry shortage of MLCC's, which usually causes Production to rope me into qualifying substitutes, and it's hard to even start the process when it seems every spec sheet has its own special recipe of missing information.

GOOD: Linear Technology. Now owned by Analog Devices so we'll see how they fare in the next couple of years, but LT is a classic case of paying a bit more to make sure it works. Only downside is they tend to favor special-function parts (that's where the money is, and they know it) so second sources are often nonexistent. Just depends on how you like to gamble.

GOOD: Vishay for passives. Get out your wallet, but like Linear Technology, you can pretty much rely on their stuff working like they say it does. Vishay is also often a source for exotic parts that few others even bother to make. I remember Jim Williams mentioning a Vishay wet slug tantalum capacitor that cost $400 each (!!!). For fun, I spent some time looking for second sources but unlike the slug, I came up dry! They were also the only source for precision small bulk metal resistors years ago, a rare and almost unknown type that was considered nearly "noiseless" due to how the substrates were formed. I built some amazingly quiet audio preamps with them.

POOR: Texas Instruments. It kills me to give them a negative rating, because I've had great success with their parts in the past. But like that other thread pointed out, of late their components have seemed needlessly complex and, let's be honest, sometimes even difficult to use. And while their spec sheets and app notes used to be second to none - they sought not just to tell you about their parts but also to educate you on the technology and mindset behind them - lately they've deteriorated significantly. It's just not safe anymore to presume that a TI part will be bulletproof, and that's a shame.

OK, that's enough to get this thread started. What component vendors do you love or hate, and why?

T3sl4co1l:
Putting any huge manufacturer in a list like this is sure to be problematic.

Such companies have a great many departments, of varying quality, between them, and over time.

TI makes a lot of expensive parts that are very good, too.

Conversely, Analog Devices makes a lot of expensive parts, and even some of those are straight up what the fuck.  Case in point, AD7793: read the sections on the SPI interface. https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/frequently-asked-questions/AD779x_FAQ_Instru_Conv.pdf It doesn't reset bus state when /CS is deasserted!

What you won't hear about are the hundreds or thousands of parts that work to varying degrees of "well"; bad news travels faster.

Regarding Vishay: their current product line is built from dozens of absorbed brands.  There is no sense in attributing the quality of any one division to the whole.  They make extremely expensive, extremely good parts, like the precision foil stuff, and they also make competitive commodity parts.

Under that perspective, as far as I understand: Vishay as a whole, is mostly built from already well known quality brands, and it doesn't seem like they've sacrificed quality for profit, at least very much.

I suggest applying the same perspective to other large companies, too.

The drawback is, companies not built from brands, will not obviously suggest where their designs or products came from.  Regarding TI, there's Burr-Brown and Unitrode (old, probably not very meaningful experience anymore?), and National (huge portfolio; probably still fairly separate?) which come to mind.  Who knows what part of TI their TPSxxx's and such are designed at?

Tim

hans:
In a recent board academia-related design, I've found that TI has also caught many "design wins". Especially if you select on criteria like low power they have plenty of analog parts available. I'm not too interested in their MSP430 series though. I think academia has some interest in them because of the learning tools/support, low complexity chips and reasonably low power consumption. There are also some interesting use cases to be thought of for FRAM, like intermittent computing, however you can also question how many computations you can run if you can't even power harvest 2uW of power to keep a modern MCU in standby.

Contrary, I've also looked at AD/LT for low power opamps, and have found some weird parts for sure. Take the LTC6255 for example. Their GBW, voltage noise and other specs are really the best you're going to get under 70 micro amps. The catcha: the input impedance is only 1-10M ohm, with lots of current noise. Obviously that is due to being a bipolar input opamp (instead of the more common FET types), but nonetheless it's interesting to see such a part in the low power domain spectrum.

mrpackethead:
GREAT: TI.   Amazing customer support and community. Rock solid parts that have not caused me any issues in tens of thousands of power supplies.   Great doco and examples, eval boards.  Easy to source and pricing is realistics.

Good and getting better. Microchip.  Very good at keeping things in Stock.

Poor. Kamakooza whoit.

Synthtech:
TI unleashed millions of sub-standard 4000 series IC’s and some op-amps onto an unsuspecting world some time ago. They were failing so badly that one company that I do servicing for had to recall huge numbers of large circuit boards and send them back to the board manufacturer in the USA to laboriously have all of the TI chips removed by hand and replaced with chips from NXP. I won’t purchase any TI DIL 4000 series IC’s, particularly 4050, 4051, 4053s because there must still be millions of defective ICs out there in supplier warehouses.

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