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PSA: do not use the TPS61099 boost reg in your designs

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IDEngineer:

--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on January 22, 2019, 11:28:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on January 22, 2019, 06:19:58 am ---they are overcomplicated
--- End quote ---
This, this and ALL OF THIS!!! They're great when they work, but it's all too easy to trip over this bullshit.
--- End quote ---

Oddly, this reminded me of the C vs. C++ thread raging in the CPU/MCU forum.  >:D  Here it is expressed in hardware... excessive complexity that often ends up being more of a hindrance.

T3sl4co1l:

--- Quote from: IDEngineer on January 23, 2019, 03:57:32 am ---Oddly, this reminded me of the C vs. C++ thread raging in the CPU/MCU forum.  >:D  Here it is expressed in hardware... excessive complexity that often ends up being more of a hindrance.

--- End quote ---

Sort of.  Notwithstanding style issues ("blargh blargh don't use C++ because I don't like its syntax and when I use it it's always so bloated!", etc.), most of that is semantics and syntax -- complexity used to generate code, but not complexity in the code itself.  The result can be quite lean and orderly.  You just have to make sure you aren't telling it to compile with more code features than you need.

So too, HDL can be quite complex at the design level, but the synthesis doesn't need to be complex.

It seems we have the worst of both worlds here.  One should not blame the tools (necessarily), but the commitment to quality is what's lacking.

Tim

IDEngineer:

--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on January 23, 2019, 04:08:38 am ---Sort of.  Notwithstanding style issues ("blargh blargh don't use C++ because I don't like its syntax and when I use it it's always so bloated!", etc.), most of that is semantics and syntax -- complexity used to generate code, but not complexity in the code itself.  The result can be quite lean and orderly.  You just have to make sure you aren't telling it to compile with more code features than you need.
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Agreed, but I was thinking more in line with your comment:


--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on January 23, 2019, 04:08:38 am ---It's a bloody switcher, what does it need all that logic for?
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...and how that syncs up with the original intent of C, to be a portable Assembly language - not a "high level" language. Just as a "simple" switcher doesn't need "all that logic", so too does a "mid-level" language not need all of the baggage of a true high level language. There are plenty of complex IC's, and complex high level languages, to choose from. Why corrupt the intentionally simpler IC's/languages?

Sorry for the hijack, back to our regularly scheduled programming....

BrianHG:
With TI, it's not just their power management ICs.  Their new norm on documentation SUCKS shit.  On their clocking ICs, I tried to get information as their formulae in the data sheet made no sense and had non-standard characters.  I was told from TI support, just use their PC configuration app to get the IC2 configuration settings.  NO... The IC said I can program any frequency I wanted, both setting the reference and feedback dividers and their config software didn't always make the most stable oscillator configuration unless I manually tweaked it.  Their own engineers couldn't decipher their own documentation...  It took 5 days and a few friends who specialized in math and physics to reverse engineer the notation in their .pdf data sheet and to get the IC to dynamically be programmed to do exactly what I want.

I also found bugs in a few of their other ICs.  If you stray anywhere from the documented examples with any TI part above opamps, be warned...  They do not proof their complex devices or test for extraneous bugs at all.

schmitt trigger:
Subscribing to this thread.

Hope that I can find some documents to share, related to some Intersil multi-phase buck converters, that were an unmitigated disaster.

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