re references for any ic in a previous article ree zach fit edu keith ledig writes i am looking for a text reference that will include pinouts description and functionality for just about any ic made does such a text exist are there docs on the internet that reference ic s it would be a great idea if each major ic manufacturer made available to the public an anonymous ftp site with all it s data books in the form of text files ala rfc style this would save time and money for the ic manufacturer since a text file costs nothing to send around the world via internet and since most users of ic s are found in the internet anyway are there any books available for purchase that reference as many as possible or am i going to be stuck obtaining a zillion databooks from the manufacturers those little phonebook type books that are obsoleted every couple years we use a cd rom based system here there are about cd rom disks and a disk changer hooked to a dedicated ms dos computer it contains scanned images of data book pages for several thousand parts when you ask it for something it knows about mostly active ic parts it works quite well they don t handle all the varieties of transistors or diodes that exist it is definately a start in the right direction but they need to expand the data base to handle more types of stuff these systems aren t cheap we paid about for the liscence and get monthly updates of some of the cd rom disks we send the old ones back to them so that they will keep sending us the updates i think we pay a yearly maintainence fee of about to get the updates if you find the part you want you can look at the data sheet on a page sized monitor it s a special monitor from sigmasystems you can also print each page of the datasheet you want on a laserjet printer page printing takes a couple of minutes per page it can take a while to dump the or pages you usually need i have a feeling the maker wouldn t like it if we made the data available to all internet users dave dave mcmahan mcmahan netcom com n w
