.. and the annswer was:
"we do not yet know which manufacturing tolerances we need allow"

It just means, that the friendly manufacturer has no glue about what he is doing right now and that he wants to misuse you as a cheap guinea pig. He hopes that you will tell him what the mistakes with this chip are.

Just keep your hands off this piece of junk.


I can see a manufacturerer who plans to have the chips manufactured at umpteen plants not knowing what value to put on an (usually relatively unimporatnt parameter) till hae has seen chips from a handful of the plants.

I have worked with many chips with a TBD or two in the datasheet, if the TBD is impoertant, I ask and if I get a concise answer I use the chip, if not, I use another.

However, I see no problem e.g. for a net powered app to use a chip where Icc max is TBD.

Erik