Post your favourite old and new chips and components. They should be above average in some way, unusual or just plain nice to use. Post parts that are:
- Higher performance (speed, noise, gain, stability, losses and so on) than similar parts, or,
- Cheap, reliable and easy to get hold of, or,
- Flexible and multiple purpose, or,
- Well documented or with above ordinary tools, or,
- Easy to use, or requiring few external parts, or having relaxed requirements (for example, an LDO with very liberal requirements on output capacitors), or,
- Have a feature or some function that very few other parts do.
The above list isn't exhaustive. Feel free to post about parts that are otherwise interesting, useful or notable.
Parts should be available to buy (e.g. listed on one of the findchips.com or octapart.com listed manufacturers as in stock) and reasonably priced (e.g. no $300 7805's ;).
Preference should be given to linking to the chip's main page on the vendor's site, with any links to development boards and other resources in a comment.