Next week we'll introduce the first installment of what I expect will be a long, well-remembered, and well-respected series of short technical articles from Texas Instruments that cover all the little facets of power management you want to know about. The Power Tips! series will essentially complement Signal Chain Basics, which is TI's contribution to Bill Schweber's Planet Analog site. If our new series is even half as successful, it'll be all I could ever hope for.
Expect to see a little bit of tutorial, a bit of "how-to," and maybe in some cases something that's akin to our Tip of the Week articles. Although at the moment we're planning the series to be a different type of technical "tip," i.e., more generic than product specific whenever possible.
I'm particularly happy to see the series coming from one of the "majors" in power management, since the IC folks up near the top tend to see it all. At the same time, it's more than a bit of effort and sacrifice for those in the semiconductor arena to write in the generic language of discrete, versus IC circuitry; after all, chips are what they do. Somehow, tho, our contributors most often deliver the goods in such a way that allows the designer to crystallize an idea with discrete parts if he/she so chooses. Although it's nice to know that if you haven't got the time and can do with a general solution that allows for a fair degree of customization, there's a chip somewhere that can do it for you.
But whichever way you look at it, the IC makers continue to constitute the core of this DesignLine, and we hope they'll continue to be as enthusiastic as they have always been. National Semiconductor in particular, with kudos also to Linear Technology and Maxim, have come through time and time again for me with some of the most widely read and useful articles you're likely to see. To be honest, we couldn't make it without them. So I'm happy to see that TI, in making the first regularly-scheduled committment to PMDL's technical section under my watch, has gone to the next level. Here's to more of the same!
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