30 Jul
2000
30 Jul
'00
10:20 p.m.
There's also the weird secondary market that
exists because of military
programs. TI has previously sold the IP and remaining dies for end-of-life
parts to other firms who then either continue production or package the
dies to meet military needs -- which is great if you need something in
a flat-pac...
Whatever happened to the flat-pac? It seems to me to be a package that
has many of the same advantages of modern SOIC's, but maybe 30 years ahead
of its time. Was it a manufacturability issue? Was it a "proprietary"
issue? The flat-pacs I worked with were ceramic or ceramic/gold, but it
seemed pretty straightforward to me to do the same thing with plastic. Am
I wrong?
Besides, many of the flat-pac pinouts were different than the DIP pinouts,
and this was actually a good thing in the case of many TTL IC's which had
power and ground pins in weird places... It seems to me that in most
cases SOIC IC's follow the DIP pinout (though I'm sure there are exceptions.)
Tim.