Used to be that a data sheet was the complete description of a part. You could pick one up and read all that you needed to know about what the component did, what its limitations were, and how you could/should incorporate it in your circuits. That doesn't seem to be completely true anymore.

The analog semiconductor industry is very good, on the whole, about completing releases only about products that are really releasable. Yes, there have been exceptions and in the last few years I could point you to maybe fifteen product releases that should never have happened. Those products ranged from the very hopeful -- where the product design group fell apart at the same time that the silicon was sampling -- to the production problem parts, to the "oops, it shouldn't do that" problems found after release.

Some analog companies have another problem which might be called the "management promised" issues. When the CEO of a company promises something, it happens. Whatever, however, it happens. So when analysts ask the common (but really incredibly stupid) question of how many products are going to be released in a particular quarter you can be sure that the number quoted will be the number achieved. The result at a couple of companies is a flurry of product releases at the end of a quarter, sometimes even on the last day.

These do no one any favor. The product managers are harried, the marketing communications personnel is seriously over-worked, and test/characterization staff are pushed to the limits. The results are often not completely favorable. Journalists receive more releases than they can handle, so the products often don't get the publicity they deserve and very often the data going to potential customers also suffers.

There is little point in trying to sell a product that is not fully characterized, and many preliminary data sheets suffer from unreported specifications, often critical numbers. One company often doesn't even have preliminary sheets available and you have to consider those products as questionable, even though the company is as solid and real as they come.

But what gets my gall these days are some of the words being used on the front page of data sheets. Here are a few from a couple that are on the top of the pile on my desk:

Ultralow
Tight
Fast
High-efficiency
Precise
Extremely-low
Very low noise
Ideal for
Drops nearly to zero
Critical in
Low
Wide
With only
Unlike some
Little change
Continuing superior performance

Am I alone in seeing all these words as marketing descriptors? And these same words used on the front page of the data sheet seem to be the ones used in the press release as well. Maybe if this trend continues companies might want to use the two interchangeably -- that would save on a few jobs.

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