If you’re like us then when you’re designing a circuit or investigating a component you are constantly referring to the same pages in your datasheets over and over again. You spend hours reading through sheets and find that one useful bit of information you needed, then you come back next month and do the same thing all over again.

Datasheets haven’t changed in decades, the invention of the PDF was the last great thing to happen to datasheets and that was back in the early 90s. At least that got us away from stacks of paper! Since then though little has changed, some manufacturers have improved a little adding tables of contents and links within PDFs, but there’s been no real innovation at all.

This is us declaring that we want to change all that. Its the 21st century now, we have the internet, we have web apps, we have loads of shiny new toys. Isn’t it about time we updated the datasheet? Its time to make the datasheet work for us, it should make our lives easier, it should give us access to the information we want right now, and it should definitely not get in our way.

In the coming weeks we’re going to be writing more about why we hate datasheets, and what we’re going to do about it. Stay tuned, change is afoot…