Do engineers still use 7400 series chips now?Or they are only for education now?

If there are still alive,whats the usage of these chips?

thanks.

 

Hello,

The 7400 series chips are hardly used commercial anymore.
The hobyists still use them quit often.
Sometimes they use the HC or HCT variant.

Here is a little overview from the 7400 series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_7400_series_integrated_circuits

There is also the 4000 series (cmos, less power and slower as the TTL series).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_4000_series_integrated_circuits

Greetings,
Bertus

 

I learned TTL when I was in college, but the fact they take 5V is pretty limiting. The CMOS CD4000 and 4500 series are more open ended.

All of these are obsolete more or less, so there will be some chips you simply can not get.

 

Agree with the above statements.

To directly answer your title question "Where are the 7400 series chips now?" ....

A good number of them are in plastic drawers in my lab, and there they will remain until my heirs throw them away at some distant (I hope) time in the future.

 

The original 74 Series devices are pretty much obselete, however the 74LS, 74ALS & 74ACT series are still very useful when building medium scale microprocessor based systems.

What else do you use for data buffers, address decoders etc?

(The 4000 series are very slow by comparison and not really suitable for this type of job).

Many current PC motherboards and the more complex I/O cards still use 74xx series devices.

 

The original 54/74 series IC's made good room heaters. However, they were a quantum leap ahead of using discrete components.

You still see them used occasionally for various things, usually something like port expanders for a low pin-count uC or the like.

However, with the availability of inexpensive uC's that can be re-programmed on the fly, using a bunch of TTL IC's just isn't cost effective anymore. Board space (PCB) is expensive; re-designs are prohibitively expensive.

 

We might be the only ones still using 7400 series in our products (commercial/Industrial machinery), we use a lot of them mostly for buffers, and for our DC Motor control modules.......

Here is pic of a 2 Speed DC Motor control PCB that we use the 74LS08, 74LS00, 74LS139, and the 74LS04 on......

 

Go back to the 1960's, a dual FF using a hand-full of 2N 404's, took a 5X5 card; big jump to resistor-transietor-logic,RTL, with a verry short life. Quantum jump to transistor-transistor-logic, TTL, which in its variants, is still in limited use today. For a 100 school alarm system,early 1970s I was forced to use TTL because RCA had only a few CMOS [ my favorite ] packages were available. I still have about 80 TTLs available to one & all for just postage.

 

Nowadays you can replace the entire 7400 series using the 74LS series, or even the 74HC/74HCT series, except for a few chips.