While companies seem to place less importance on writing “general-purpose” app notes and white papers these days, one of the best treasure troves of real-world, time-tested information on the design and development process is in the sea of app notes produced and compiled by most of the big players in the semiconductor industry.  There’s an amazing amount of insight buried in some of these documents, going from introductory concepts (unfortunately this is exactly the kind of stuff you see less of these days), through to the narrowest fields of interest.  While the best reference books are always a bargain in terms of knowledge-imparted-per-dollar-spent, it occured to me that it might be nice to mix in some app notes and white papers with the weekly book review.

This weeks recommended reading?  … click through to find out!

This weeks recommended reading is AN1325.0 from Intersil: Choosing and Using Bypass Capacitors. While this might be old hat to people who have been at this for a while, questions like what value of capactor should I be using and why, what’s the difference between a tantalum, electrolytic or ceramic capacitor and when should I choose them, etc., are things we’ve all asked at some point, and they aren’t always as clearly explained as they could be.  While all of these app notes and white papers are aimed at engineers or engineering students, meaning they assume a certain familiarity with some terms or ideas, this app note by Intersil does a good job of explaining the basic of capacitors … and hey, it’s free knowledge.

I’m going to dig through my “app notes” folder and dig out some of the best ones for future recommendations, but do you have some absolute favorite oldies that you found valuable?  Leave a note in the comments sections and let everyone else know about it.  There’s definately gold in them there hills, if you just know where to dig.