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Comment by aylons | Hacker News Reader

Everyone who maintains designs with NXP parts, please take notice: this is a good time to download and keep all the documentation on these components.

Qualcomm's track record on releasing and delivering documentation is among the worst in industry. If you are not a big buyer they vetted, they won't even answer your emails or send you the NDA. And after NXP bought Freescale, previously available documents went missing. So, all care must be taken.

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Totally agree. Freescale, NXP and TI are all great at documentations etc. Qualcomm and Broadcom and Marvell are all notorious on that regard, in most cases all you can get is a product brief unless you're their top 10 customers, otherwise they probably don't even bother sending you a NDA. Broadcom was bought up, Marvell is going nowhere, Qualcomm is the exception though itself is undercut by MediaTek/Huawei these days heavily, which is probably one major reason for this deal. Really sad to see Qualcomm swallows in NXP/Freescale.

MediaTek has quite a few leaked datasheets out there on various Chinese forums, and so do RDA and some of the other lesser-known SoC makes; I haven't seen the same for Broadcom nor Qualcomm. Maybe it's the different culture ( https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 ) that facilitates this.

It's a shame. We have made many designs based on Freescale parts, and a large reason we chose Freescale was documentation. The NXP acquisition of Freescale seemed to largely maintain the status quo, but I am worried about qualcomm..

Yes I too feel the same way NXP and freescale have been go to SoC vendors for me - their great and easy to find docs have been the big plus for me - frankly if I can't go to Digikey or Mouser and click on that "data sheet" link I'm probably not going to use your chip

I guess it's time to go an have another look at that NXP chip I just qualified

I just finished up a design with references to NXP documents, blog posts, etc... Time to go through and capture all of that info.

I honestly can't believe they and Broadcom continue this idiocy. Makes no sense whatsoever. A lot of small gigs I've worked used freescale parts, and don't have the leverage to get the datasheets. How absurd a situation.

Maybe this is a good project for ArchiveTeam. Looking at some google searches, there looks to be about 100k PDFs to download from NXPs website. I'm sure the majority is data sheets and application notes.

I'd be willing to help download this data if there was an collaborative organized attempt to it.

I would also be more than happy to donate all 200mbit of my available bandwidth to this effort. Maybe some folks who are much more talented at scripting than I can figure out a way to scrape a list of URLs to the PDFs.

Where would one find an index of these PDFs?

NXP's docs are all over the place and they change when there are big changes to the product lines.

"Everyone who maintains designs with NXP parts... this is a good time to download and keep all the documentation"

That's kind of funny because I've had some bad experiences with NXP when it comes to documentation for some specific chips. Although, NXP does provide a lot of documentation related to technologies in general. That stuff is easily available.

Would it be possible for you to pop into #archiveteam on EFNet? I'm not sure where to start with getting the PDFs - this may be a good project for http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=PDF_2016 but they'd need a (large) list of PDFs.

Working happily with NXP... Hope this won't affect things. The documentation and cooperation are all great so far.

You can bet that the documentation for older parts has already been uploaded to the numerous datasheet sites out there, but I agree that redundancy is always better on the safe side.

This x100... I totally echo this experience..

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