New Texas Instruments 5532 chips are not the 5532s we’ve used for decades
groupdiy.com123 points by SpikedCola 3 days ago
123 points by SpikedCola 3 days ago
Dave Jones didn't spare words [1] on how insane it was to have a jellybean component changing specs so significantly, particularly the input voltage from 22V to 18V, the removal of offset trim, and more.
Something is going on over a TI. They tried to scrub their old datasheets from the web a few years ago too [1]
[1] - Texas Instruments sent a DMCA takedown to a site archiving data sheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682785 - 354 points by DyslexicAtheist on Jan 8, 2021 | 122 comments
I got one of those take down notices because I had their catalog of Space Grade Rad Hard parts on my website. About six directory levels down; did I give TI permission to invade my site?. Any Human would have seen it as promoting their parts, which was not the direct intention. The Bot just said it was a Copyright violation and I had to remove it from my site or they would send lawyers after me. It wasn't worth the time to fight.
I've been screwed by TI many times in one way or other. As have colleagues. They did a die-change of a MSP430 and it stopped working in their product. No answer was forthcoming from TI.
I had designed in a Silicon Labs Bluetooth module a few years ago. Now that TI has bought SiLabs, I'm designing it out. I simply don't trust TI. They once were a good company. They went downhill fast after they got rid of all of the support people and moved support online via forums.
Why do companies always do this? Always the largest companies with all the money to quietly host what at most a couple hundred mb of data and they just don't. Kill the old download links. Ruin all the old support articles that point to those old download links. Ruin all the old forum posts that point there. What is even crazier is sometimes they still have the files they just don't expose them, they make you beg for them with the support agent from across the world who asks if you have tried unplugging the thing first when you ask for the download you know you already want. Infuriating, boring dystopia.
Because they're changing out their backend CMS and have deemed it too expensive to port ask three old documentation over.
An amusing aside: Look at the list of "applications." Netbooks? Multichannel video transcoders? Scalable platforms?
I've seen this in other TI datasheets. One old general purpose 74HC series logic chip included "E Meters" in its applications.
My hunch is that whoever was assigned to add these "applications" to each data sheet was having some harmless fun.
Another note is that I'm a low profile customer of Digi-Key and Mouser. Both of them send out change notifications on parts that I've ordered in the past.
Funnily enough, E-Meters are known to be made with fairly high quality components.
https://hackaday.com/2018/07/19/whats-inside-a-scientology-e...
I guess if you have tons of cash rolling in, you might as well commit to it.
EEVblog 1752 - Texas Instruments SCREWED UP the NE5532!
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Summary of changes:
- Input stage changed from NPN to PNP
- Slew rate decreased from 9V/µs to 5V/µs
- Supply voltages absolute ratings decreased from ±22V to ±18V
This sort of thing really annoys me. Part numbers are for use of engineers, not for the marketing dept. If you change the specs, change the part number.
Kind of.
I want all 7400s to be four NAND gates, regardless of how they are implemented. As long as the results are correct, you might as well put a little ARM controller pretending to be four NAND gates.
For analog parts, I agree any change to the data sheet should receive at least a different suffix letter.
I disagree. At a certain moment you start to rely on behavior, knowingly or unknowingly.
These kind of changes might surface bugs that you never had.
If you relied on behavior not in the spec this is on you.
In these cases of the TI parts, some of their most important specifications, like maximum supply voltage, noise and slew rate, have been changed, and not by a few percent, but by even a factor close to 2.
For so great changes, it is really not acceptable to use the same part number, especially when the part numbers have been in widespread use for many decades, so most users who are familiar to them will not bother to check again their latest specifications, where they could notice that they are no longer what they knew.
I can see both sides of this. I really want different part numbers for the same reason you do.
However we deal with a lot of regulated products and to just open a case at one of the Government Paper-Pusher Regulators will cost us $5,000 to just change the part number. We are a small company and $5k hurts.
I'm sure it does and you have my sympathies, but your situation would not be a reason to let Texas freakin' Instruments off the hook. They're not exactly "a small company", and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5k would have been cheaper than dealing with the response to this, so this just comes across as incompetence on their end.
... How do the "paper-pusher regulators" feel about getting a completely different part unannounced? I would guess unhappy, tbh. Like based on the thread it's not trivial changes.
Kind of like keeping a certain plane model number the same, and claiming that re-training isn't needed even when it clearly is
An iPhone 17 is very different to an iPhone 3G, but we can pretend to ignore the fact one had its first flight in 1968 and the other in 2016.
> If you change the specs, change the part number.
They took it from SW. You know this joke with "Windows is a single platform" ? Or the joke with "use rust if you can compile it" ? Or "your browser version is not supported" ?
Enshitification reaches everything.
It annoys me too but part numbers are not a spec but more of a strong hint. The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test. Even for a 2N2222 or whatever.
Keeping in mind, though, that this is a jellybean part. You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier, because many vendors produce "a" 5532, and they're all the same. Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
(And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs, including the 22V max input voltage. Because a design that was built for "a" 5532 was usually built to run it up to 100%; and that a vendor couldn't offer their part as a swap-in if it couldn't do that.)
But now, if your purchasing department (or the supplier they purchase from) happens to order TI 5532s — or if the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock — then your product is now broken, with no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI.
The EEVBlog[1] video about this has a nice example of only a single chinese manufacturer offering the same stuff as TI now does, even with the same PNP instead of NPN topology. All the others are comparable to the original.
> Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
That may be true for a small webshop or a brick-and-mortar electronics store (what few of those still exist). Or be true for end users / manufacturers of equipment that includes such a part.
But (afaik) that's not how it works for large reputable distributors like Mouser, Digikey & co. You don't order a generic "5532" there, you order a 5532 from <specified manucturer> there. Part from manufacturer A may, or may not be interchangeable with same-numbered part from manufacturer B. There's even some parts that have same # but very different function between manufacturers. In other words: buyers, designers do your homework.
Likewise in a design, if you specify "5532" that should read as "any manufacturer's 5532 should do". If not (or unsure / untested), one should specify the part including its manufacturer. Or a list of acceptable manufacturer/part# combo's.
Ofcourse changing the spec significantly for a jellybean part like discussed here (and one with many 2nd sources), that's just evil. Change a part like that, give it its own part #.
>You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier
This is not true.
>because many vendors produce "a" 5532
This is true, in the sense of a "5532-type part". But you will note that all the 5532 variants have different manufacturer's part numbers (prefixes and suffixes) to prevent this confusion. They don't just do that for branding.
>and they're all the same.
This is emphatically and trivially not true, and it tells me you haven't done the work of carefully comparing data sheet specs across suppliers. Try it, you'll learn something.
>Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!
That might happen somewhere, but authorized distributors do not do this and volume manufacturers do not do this. You might have an internal part number with an authorized suppliers list that includes more than one variant of 5532 that has been vetted for production.
>And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs
Again, emphatically and trivially not true. Take a careful look at the NJM and On Semi data sheets. Spec by spec. Do the work and be amazed.
>the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock
Authorized distributors do not do this. It gets hairy when you're sourcing NOS from grey market dealers for old designs or in severe part crunches like 2020-2022 era, but that's a different story.
>no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI
This concept is backwards. You would have an internal part number for 5532-type op amp, and it would have an authorized vendors list that would only include vetted parts. "Any 5532 but TI" is asking for trouble from someone else.
And parts do change or get updated and if you are buying from authorized distributors for production you and your supply chain and quality people will get product change notices. At that point it's your job (or the component engineer's, if you're fortunate enough to have one) to validate the new version or find a suitable alternate.
Dave Jones also did some videos on the LMV321 used in his uCurrent Gold project. The AS5X variant caused issues while others worked fine.
Looking now, a document source suggests the AS5X variant in the parts list... but it's explained in the video around 19:30
MPF102 is my favourite there.
“It’s a JFET” is your only guarantee.
Buy binned parts and design spec spread into it.
> The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test.
Is this backed up by court precedent? This seems like you could easily claim damages due to a differently speccd part.
I’m not doubting that’s how the industry operates, but it seems wrong so I’m curious what is supporting such a dysfunctional form of doing business.
It has worked this way since the days of the vacuum tube, so there probably is some legal precedence somewhere. I think part of this with the NE5532 is just that these days most EEs spend most of their time with digital where the data sheet and its spec is absolute; in the linear world the spec sheet is an ideal and an average because the parts themselves are an ideal and the real world never lines up with the math. Back when the NE5532 came out it was still common to see power supplies that were unregulated or barely regulated or cheap regulators with poor tolerance that would vary a fair amount with wall voltage and massive tolerances on passives, data sheets and EEs took this into account, most parts would survive max voltage but there would be a higher failure rate, so run at 70% or 80% and you don't have to worry about it.
In these days of cheap SMPS and EEs that are trained with a strong lean towards digital and much improved IC fab, the max seems to be treated as the max safe voltage for good reliability and life, and you don't have to worry much about the tolerances of everything else so much. Back in the 90s when I was learning this stuff, the old EEs scolded me when ever I ran at max voltage and would patiently explain it all to me and that even if it can operate at that voltage, you can't be certain your PS will still be putting out that voltage in a year, parts drift as they age and accidents happen and the world is not ideal. They were right.
They’re just not really standardized at all, especially semiconductors. Not in the sense you’d expect naively. Some were a long time ago, and supposedly the old Japanese sc parts were, down to die geometry and process. But otherwise, the part number means “this is like the part with a similar number first made by someone else”, not “this is an exact replacement in every way”
Specs are just that... specs. A 7400 is one thing, but if you designed a circuit that barely avoids oscillating with a 10 MHz GBW, an unsolicited "upgrade" to the opamp that raises its GBW to 12 MHz may be more of a disaster than a favor.
Frankly it's not OK to "upgrade" plain old TTL parts, either, since a faster 7400 might expose a race condition that never caused problems before, or cause EMI problems that didn't exist before.
This is the electronics equivalent of Python3's breaking changes to string handling. It's pure evil, and will have 2nd order effects for decades.
How were they python 3 changes pure evil? I think it was a good thing for the language in the long run, and the earlier you do it, the better.
In the long run, python projects just became an unmaintainable mess, and now lots of devs moved on or use python less. At least in my experience.
Because unicode and f-string replacements in an open source project are the devil and have completely similar parallels to a proprietary hardware chiplet being altered without any recourse? Axe grind me harder daddy.
Unicode isn't the devil. Deliberately break compatibility and forcing everyone to rewrite code is. There were compatible ways to do it, but political correctness won out.
>Axe grind me harder daddy.
My axes are ambient authority based operating systems, programmers who call themselves engineers, and case sensitive programming languages. Unicode is fine, just don't take away my ASCII. ;-)
Also featured here: https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/texas-instruments-changes-th...
This is fucking dire. Lowering voltage will just lead to early failures for poor clueless designers/repairmen that had old datasheet saved and just assume it will never change but slew rate chance is just "well it works, but suddenly it's worse in certain applications"
And here I naively thought Texas Instruments is expensive but at least decent.
Turns out no.
There are better and superior alternative of NE5532 these days. People should just move on. OPA1612 is the king in highest-end audio performance, at least on datasheet paper.
The ne5532 is not an awesome part by any means.
It is a decent part, and an extremely popular one found in loads of designs.
There's the saying anything you hear has passed through a pack of those before reaching your ears.
This is why it is so bad for TI to change the specs without changing the part number.
The Boeing 737 Max of chips …
Oh, wow, I was expecting from the title that, eh, maybe they changed the process or something, and someone was being a bit fussy. But yeah, no, different part.
Across the board TI is moving to new fabs, new fab processes and 300 mm wafers. So the old tooling is going away and they're adapting legacy designs to the new processes. This changes component behavior, particularly analog stuff, like these op amps.
That's all inevitable and has happened in the semiconductor business before. When it happens, manufacturers are forced to choose; obsolete old parts that can't be indistinguishably reproduced on the new node, or and sell substantially different components under existing SKUs, so they can keep booking orders from high volume customers without disruption.
In this case, the latter is happening. In all probability their high volume customers have already accounted for the PCN because TI told them it was coming years ago, back when the new fab buildout started and the lithography machines were first ordered.
> so they can keep booking orders from high volume customers without disruption.
Clearly there is disruption though. It's more a matter of whether or not it's openly acknowledged.
It's not clear if the SMT version is also bad?
There's no reason it isn't as the die is likely the same just in a different package.
This is why you should always order new parts for a new design and never, never trust the old guy with the magic parts box. Also why learning to read and compare data sheets skeptically is a fundamental skill.
The rumbling and grumbling is because they read the data sheets.
No, I’m talking about the guy that builds prototypes out of his magic parts box and says “oh, you can still get those” when the last direct substitute was obsoleted in 2008. Or he’s using the old version of a part like this in a “proven” subcircuit and NOT checking for change notices or other the new data sheets. That’s what I mean by the “magic parts box”. Buy new parts for new prototypes and read all the latest data, folks.