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Comment by moftz | Hacker News Reader

Analog Devices and Linear Technology (now owned by Analog Devices) have the cleanest looking datasheets. Texas Instruments is ok but not great. Standard Microcircuit Drawings, the kind of government datasheets used for milspec parts, are absolutely horrendous and should be avoided if the manufacturer has a normal looking datasheet to look at.

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Linears are great, I find the AD sheets hard to read sometimes. Microchip historically has some decent ones but it’s been a while since I’ve used their parts.

Datasheets for Japanese connectors are like a circle of hell for me. Confusing and possibly incomplete dimensions, and the drawing usually looks like it was printed, scanned, and converted to jpg several times.

Ugh, I've been using a datasheet from Panasonic [0] recently, and it's been a trip. The original Japanese is all there, with a lackluster English translation below each paragraph. Plugging the Japanese in to Google Translate for the particularly bad sections usually helps. At least this version is clean, I ran across a few PDFs floating around for this part that looked like they had been run though the print-scan-jpeg cycle a few times.

0: https://mediap.industry.panasonic.eu/assets/custom-upload/Co...

Eait until you see Chinese market only parts without datasheets in English, and thenselves mostly done by not so bright engineers of sales offices of Western big semis.

TI's technical reference manuals for their MCUs are some of the best I've used, though. That's not saying much. But compared to Marvell or NXP/Freescale they're really good.

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