National Semiconductor Introduces Year's Worth of Products All at Once

To keep up with developments in the analog and mixed signal market, I employ—among other strategies—a Web crawler. It's a nifty program called Offline Explorer by MetaProducts. I have it programmed to go out every night and scour the Web for new products and press releases on almost 300 sites. So, not surprisingly, I see a lot of new products.

Each day's catch is filleted, flash frozen, and shipped to our crack content staff at company headquarters in Bedford, MA. In the normal course of events, the product announcement stories are posted within a day or two, providing you with what we hope is the most comprehensive and timely news feed for analog and mixed signal.

Keeping up with the flow of new products and other developments is no small job. Each of the major analog and mixed-signal houses can be expected to introduce 200 to 300 new products a year. And then there are all the smaller, specialty firms that make only a few introductions a year, but these products are significant for specialized applications.

We try to keep an even strain and process things as they come. But imagine my surprise—if not outright dismay—when late last month I checked National Semiconductor's new product pages and found that almost 200 new products had appeared virtually overnight. The products were all posted on individual pages, one per device. So to make things more manageable for you, we attempted to group them into families of related devices. Still, it was quite a rabbit for our snake to swallow.

Now you might be wondering, as I did, just why National would debut so many products all at once rather than spread them out over the year. I have tried to secure an answer but my sources are mum.

I have noticed that National seems to be alone among major analog and mixed signal makers in developing all its new parts in house. Rivals have been buying up smaller firms left and right to expand their portfolios as quickly as possible. So perhaps the recent introductions were a counter to acquisitions by companies such as Texas Instruments to expand their catalog-parts lines.

Or maybe it was just that National's Web people had a backlog of material to post that they finally got around to.