Reference designs matter, as this TV design illustrates

摘要

You might wonder why we would choose a TV design as a milestone in our 50th-anniversary review of key events that had lasting impact. Well, the TV clearly had a lasting impact, and, at the time, using transistors in TVs was leading-edge technology. But this Texas Instruments (www.ti.com) design probably isn't milestone-worthy per se. In fact, TI clearly stated that it had no intention of manufacturing the TV set. Instead, the TI engineers set out to prove the viability of using transistors in a TV design, hoping that their work would lead TV manufacturers to adopt transistors in place of vacuum tubes. You can go to www.edn.com/060525mtm to read the entire story and see a schematic; the sidebar "Self-contained TV receiver uses 24 transistors" is an excerpt. Nowhere in the original article will you find the term "reference design," but that's precisely what TI's engineers created. Today, the reference design is more important than ever.