There’s also some fantastic videos explaining the inner workings of the 555 timer (from a practical perspective) in this series on building a clock module for a breadboard computer - https://eater.net/8bit/clock
Is there source for 'most popular IC', or this is just another urban legend? I don't know many products that would require timing, but don't have some microcontroller. I would rather bet that eg. 7805 regulator is used much more.
> Since the introduction of the 555 by Signetics in 1972, this integrated circuit has outsold all other IC types by a wide margin, with over 1 billion units sold worldwide in 2003 alone.
It’s what we used as a starting point in 2005. It's the "Hello World" of electronics, and seemingly a commonality across the world. I love this IC because it is so simple, predictable, and understandable; the perfect jumping off point to learn electronics.
The 741 is obsolete... almost nobody uses it anymore. In terms of a jellybean opamp, I would guess that the LM358 and friends (LM321, LM324, and modernized rail-to-rail CMOS descendants) are quite a bit more popular.
The bipolar LM358 family is also pretty much obsolete by modern standards (plenty of nicer rail-to-rail amps available), but you can't beat them on price since they've been second sourced by practically every analog company in the industry.
Part of the reason it's historically sold so well is that its particular combination of features is difficult to get economically in other ways. If you want, say, a blinking LED without a microcontroller, it can't really be done without a 555 except at severe penalty in cost, complexity, or both. Any analog solution involving an op-amp, for example, has to deal with the fact that an op-amp is usually more expensive than a 555!
(Example: TI's cheapest 555 is the NE555 in TSSOP-8 package at $0.05, and their cheapest op-amp is the LM321LV in SOT23-5 package at $0.04, actually slightly cheaper than I remember last time I went looking for the cheapest op-amp money could buy. But the op-amp will require more supporting components, increasing total cost.)
That's not true for voltage regulators: there are many other parts that do what a 7805 does and many ways to build that function, some of which can sometimes end up cheaper.
Of course, the previous caveat of "without a microcontroller" is quickly becoming a concern of the past, and, accordingly, the 555 isn't designed in nearly as often as it was even in 2003.
nowadays it's usually cheaper to use a microcontroller. That actually wasn't true if you go back further than a decade. 555s heydey was when MCs were relatively expensive.
I learned so much from those Mim's books. When I was a EE undergrad I could take the theory and look at how a real engineer did things and often go "oh...I see".
I do remember time when 555 was too expensive and exotic for everyday use. There was standard way to implement same functionality with NANDs using all the gates in SN7400, but cannot find it now in the Interwebbs. Especially when Russians started to make 7400 look-a-likes with 2 millimeter pin spacing.
You could implement some types of multivibrators with NANDs, and oscillators with pretty loose specs, but I'm not sure you could do everything that a 555 could do. The 555 definitely had more precision. But people do forget what could be done with a couple of very simple gates.
Recently I was using an arduino to generate a PWM signal to dim a light in response to a potentiometer. I was looking to reduce the complexity of the circuit (removing the unnecessary microprocessor). My first thought was "hmm, I wonder if this is why the 555 exists?"
This is an excellent article. I learnt more about IC design/implementation from this article than from any other I have seen.
It even has an interactive tool where you can click on a component on either the die shot or the schematic and it shows which parts correspond to each other.
This was part of an educational kit I played with, as a kid: Chip-Chap [1]. Was too young to understand the "how", but getting things to work by following the manual was an absolute delight!
