You Can Have My TIPs When You Pry Them From My Cold, Dead Hands

szczys writes: Should you trash brand new parts developed decades ago and adopt newer models? The argument centers around TIP parts which are a standard type of transistor developed in 1969. This debate started out with a post from Tom Jennings who is known as the creator of Fidonet but works a lot with electronic hardware. Adam Fabio — himself an Electronics Engineer — picked up on the argument for the other side. He attests that if used in the proper application these parts are second to none.

Comments

TIP series are good devices

[Anonymous Coward]

...but the things expected have evolved from that time until now. The TIP devices, being bipolar technology, are inherently less efficient than their modern cousins, which are mostly CMOS FET technology. The operation of bipolar and FET transistors is fundamentally different, and what is taught today very often overlooks bipolar devices altogether. Further, the older devices tend to be physically larger than modern equivalents, which is a natural consequence of the lower efficiency demanding more surface area to radiate waste heat. The TIP devices are carburetors in a fuel-injected world.

Re:TIP series are good devices

[Pentium100]

And yet, carburetors are used for a lot of engines - small engines such as those in lawn mowers or chainsaws and also in light aircraft engines.

Sometimes the smaller device does not mean better - SMT parts, for example, are more difficult to solder pretty much require etching a PCB (instead of using a perfboard or point-to-pont construction). Also, if I am building an electronic load or an analog amplifier, the transistors are going to dissipate a lot of heat anyway, so I might as well get a TO-3 part.

Re:TIP series are good devices

[serviscope_minor]

being bipolar technology, are inherently less efficient than their modern cousins, which are mostly CMOS FET technology.

This is not insightful or informative, it's plain wrong. Firstly, the competitor to BJT is MOSFET, not CMOS, since the latter implies two transistors not one. Secondly BJT and MOSFETs have substantially different characteristics. BJTs are faster linear amps, MOSFETS are faster at power switching, whereas BJTs handle very high powers better MOSFETS have better drive characteristics etc etc.

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Besides if one was inherently superior why does the IGBJT exist?

Re:TIP series are good devices

[Vapula]

Bipolar transistors and FET works on very different principles. For example, the input capacitance of a FET is much higher which can bring some problems in "high frequency" (sometimes, not so high) designs.

FET are also more sensitive components (Vgb can get quite high due to static electricity and lead to component destruction) and may need special driver circuits (for example to make the switch faster).

And, don't forget that more and more of "today's" components are SMD only... which makes using them on a breadboard, a perfboard or a stripboard either difficult or impossible.

Re:adam fabio

[icebike]

Adam Fabio — himself and Electronics Engineer

I'm more interested in the name of the Electronics Engineer.

Do something productive ...

[MacTO]

If you're actually concerned about this, rewrite the tutorials rather than complaining about them. A big part of the reason why reach for those parts is because someone taught them how to use them.

old clunky junk

[mirix]

Not sure why the "hobbyist" community holds onto old crud like this when newer things are cheaper and better, win win. Darlingtons are terribly inefficient. It will work fine for turning on a lamp from your arduino but so will 10,000 different FETs.

Like people using ua741 opamps that are older than me. At least move into 1980 and use an LM358 or something. Same price or cheaper, and the input actually goes to one rail. Still very old junk, but significantly less so.

I guess people read some circuit from 1975 and figure they need to use the same parts verbatim, buy a bunch and are stuck with them making new circuits, that they then post, and more noobs buy the same old junk!

Re:old clunky junk

[Mashiki]

The same reason why some people still build stuff using tubes even though a IC could do it, easier, faster, and cheaper.

Re:old clunky junk

[Pentium100]

Programming microcontrollers is difficult, especially debugging the program (it's not like with a PC program where you can use a debugger or log everything etc), Arduino makes it a bit easier. Discrete logic is easier still, but if you want to do anything complicated the 74xx chips take up a lot of space.

Also, there is such thing as "good enough". If I want to drive a nixie tube (or something else that requires relatively high voltage and low current), I'll use a MPSA42. Why? Because it's cheap and works OK for that purpose. I am not buying millions of them so even if some other part is $0.01 cheaper, my time wasted evaluating and selecting for it is worth more than the $0.1 I'll save buying 10 of them. Quite a few times I buy what the local store has in stock instead of special ordering a part. If the in-stock part can work where I need it to, then OK.

Re:old clunky junk

[Anonymous Coward]

"Like people using ua741 opamps that are older than me. At least move into 1980 and use an LM358 or something. Same price or cheaper, and the input actually goes to one rail. Still very old junk, but significantly less so."
My favorite is the oldy-moldy OP-10. I happened to be interested in a _very_ low Input Impedance Op Amp at one time, (Not FET stuff...). Ten OP-10s in parallel brought the Input Impedance below 0.01 Ohms, and with some attention paid to topology, a linear sensitivity down to the 1:1 PicoAmp level. (This was for a Single-Turn Beam Transformer.) And it was fast, unlike most current Instrumentation Amplifiers, with the -3dB point at ~12KHz. Fast enough to see and tune out Ion Source noise. The typical technique back then- a lot of windings feeding a 50 Ohm cable and then into a 50m Ohm Terminator to derive a voltage, was and is hopelessly inefficient and noisy.

People are comfortable dealing with expected Impedance values, and most of the Literature unfortunately supports this.
    I've gone to the opposite extreme on occasion; measuring the EV and Emittance, (Quantum Territory here...), of an individual accelerated Nucleon. The Nucleon exited the Detector pretty much unmolested. (Quick calculation here: ~10e22 Ohms.) This took advantage of not the Particle Information, but the Wave Information, and a whole lot of Liquid Helium.

Re:old clunky junk

[serviscope_minor]

Looks like we have a component snob here.

Some people are amazingly derogatory about the "maker community". I wouldn';t exactly class myself as one but I don't get the hate. As far as I can tell, the maker community is about making (duh) *things*. The point being, the final thing is what matters and the process of getting there is "whatever works". This is fine. The emphasis is not on building something using the best tools available, it's about getting to the end goal.

Makers as a result tend to only care about the guts of the circuits and stuff if those affect the final thing. Hence the near obsession with Arduino. It reduces 99% of the work to an already solved problem, even if the solution is in some sense not optimal.

But they're not trying to make the smallest/cheapest object, they're trying to make AN object generally that no one else has.

And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.

Not sure why the "hobbyist" community holds onto old crud like this when newer things are cheaper and better, win win. Darlingtons are terribly inefficient. It will work fine for turning on a lamp from your arduino but so will 10,000 different FETs.

Who cares? The price probably isn't significant part of the overall cost. $MAKER has a box of darlington pairs, all $MAKER's friends have them and he can probably pick up a replacement in a Maplin on a Sunday if he blows out one away from his normal supply.

Hobbyists oddly enough don't tend to have a trade account with Farnell or want to wait until Tuesday morning (which to them translates to next Saturday) to get the part.

And if the maker in question has a circuit known to work and give enough power, there's no point saving a buck but adding a few hours to a multi-hundred hour project.

Like people using ua741 opamps that are older than me. At least move into 1980 and use an LM358 or something. Same price or cheaper, and the input actually goes to one rail. Still very old junk, but significantly less so.

I say this as someone who refularly uses the sub 3V micropower rail to rail single supply op-amps from TI and Linear (ever seen an 8 pin BGA before?). A 741 is essentially a tank with 8 pins. For low spec stuff the performance is perfectly fine. If you don't need low power, rail to rail operation or high speeds they work and do the job perfectly. They are also infeasibly robust.

For a circuit which only needs a 741, you may as well design it for one. There's lots of pin compatible ones you can swap in at a pinch if you really need. But again it doesn't matter.

741 does the job if the job is not to have the most optimised circuit but instead one that does the job.

I guess people read some circuit from 1975 and figure they need to use the same parts verbatim, buy a bunch and are stuck with them making new circuits, that they then post, and more noobs buy the same old junk!

No the problem is yorr goals and attitudes are different from other people's. You don't understand them so you assume they're idiots. I know a bunch of them and they're not.

If you tried to make some of the stuff they made they'd probably be shaking their heads in week 3 when you've been poring over datasheets and finally sent your circuitboard plans off to be made when they'd have their 4th arduino already bodged inside the laser cut wood case with duct tape and jumper wires with the thing mostly working.

Re:old clunky junk

[geoskd]

Plenty of microcontroller programmers allow for active debugging in an IDE. Off the top of my head, a PICKIT2 for PICs or any of the Cypress PSOC kits. A lot of older microcontrollers required an expensive debugger, but now some of these are quite cheap, for example the SWD debugger on a $10 PSOC5LP board.

While I agree that Cypress has some excelent tools, debugging firmware is bitchy hard whether you have good tools or not. You can't use SWD to effectively debug interrupt handlers, and if you're writing firmware without using *lots* of interrupt handlers, you're doing it wrong.

Debugging firmware is still one of the black arts. It requires patience, creativity and more than a little tolerance for blowing up a part and having to solder a new one on. On the up side at least we're pretty much out of the bad old days of needing a bus analyser to follow execution control since the advent of JTAG and SWD, but these are not the solution to everything.

Re: old clunky junk

[Bing Tsher E]

You can also buy an Ardiuno knockoff on eBay for under $10. Pick one that uses a socketed through-hole AVR processor, and you can use it like a development system. Prototype and debug your design. When it's finished pull the chip out of the Arduino to build onto your custom board and plug in a fresh chip.

Also you can get Arduino clone boards from places like banggood.com for $3.20.

link here

Where are the advantages?

[marcansoft]

I have no doubt that old-school TIP series transistors still have plenty of uses today, but the article is completely devoid of any examples. All it is saying is "look, these things aren't unusably bad for driving motors - they're just bad." Tom's post is still dead-on - using old school NPN BJTs for switching heavy loads today is completely dumb, and just because he exaggerated a bit about just how bad it can get doesn't mean he's wrong.

I was hoping for some insight, like a discussion of robustness (I've blown FETs way more easily than I've blown BJTs), or perhaps use in analog applications, or anything else really. But nope. TFA is literally just confirming the findings that it's trying to disprove, while providing absolutely no counter-examples. Somehow feels like par for the course for Hackaday these days...

I use old school jellybean parts all the time, sometimes because it really doesn't matter (driving a relay? meh, throw a BC547 on it, who cares, it's relatively low power anyway), sometimes because it's all I have lying around, but sometimes using ancient devices is actually very dumb, and I wouldn't turn a motor on and off with a BJT these days.

We actually use them in our telescopes

[NixieBunny]

The TIP120 is not too efficient, but if you're already going to be dropping a couple volts in the transistor, it simply doesn't matter. Our radio telescopes use very low resistance coils to control the attenuation of a microwave signal using a device called a ferrite modulator. Its voltage drop is about 1 volt, and the lowest power supply available is 5V, so it works fine. Plus, we have a bin with 50 of the darn things in the parts cabinet. So there, Tom! (I jest. He's one of my best friends.)

Needless limiting of options

[Ashtead]

Where to begin?

Should one even bother to do anything about advice from someone who goes on about enhancement MOSFETs while everything else is rubbish, and then present the circuit symbols for Junction FETs as examples? Makes one wonder what else is inaccurate there.

The actual advice of throwing out anything designed in the past century is at sensitiveresearch.com/DoNotTIP/index.html.

Where not only the so-called TIPs, (by which is meant a certain series of reasonably popular power transistors in TO220 packages, designed by Texas Instruments) but also other devices such as 2N2222, LM386, and "bipolar transistors" and so on, are no longer to be used. Just because they might not be the best choice for switching loads controlled by an Arduino or similar.

This makes for a needless limiting of options -- If all one ever does is to turn things on or off from some microcontroller maybe, but with whatever designs I make I find that to be a small fraction of what is happening. The rest are things like multi-frequency linear or RF where all kinds of semiconductor devices might be applicable. Even vacuum tubes in some cases.

And then looking around the site and discovering the author is in his own words, "reasonably obsessed with the early history of electronic (not necessarily digital) computing" --- and then he advocates discarding what amounts to the elements of the analog electronic computers? This does not ring true.

Re:TIPS means to...

[Anonymous Coward]

"TIPs" refers to Texas Instrument Power devices. A _Trade_ Name. A more Generic name is BJT- Bipolar Junction Transistor, of which TIPs are a variant.
The Summary is one of the most ignorant in recent Slashdot memory. It's not even worth being labeled "Flamebait"; not enough thought was given for that designation. BJTs thrive in all sorts of Analog Markets to this day.
But, well, Samzenpus...
"Adam Fabio — himself and Electronics Engineer..." What the Hell is that supposed to mean?

TIP?

[Anne Thwacks]

I presume TIPxxx refers to "Texas Instruments Plastic" transistors. These have proprietry TI part numbers - although many were later second sourced.

The parts were widely used because they were very cheap, and widely available. The early ones used a plastic that tended to burst into flames if the device was overloaded.

There are generally perfectly adequate alternatives with the European Standard numbers (BCxxx). It is unclear why these people are promoting a strangely obsolete technology, and the OP is not much help in understanding any of the relevant issues.