Gents,
great discussion around this topic, thanks for providing and discussing your first-hand perspective. We (TI) are actually in the process of making our device datasheets more useful/applicable and improve general alignment and consistency, and this applies across both the embedded and analog sides of our product offering. Believe me it is no small undertaking and changes will affect future products being released to the market more so than products that have already been released. Without going into too much detail at this point, what this will mean specifically for MSP430 is that there will be some general basic application circuit and layout information provided in the datasheets to help exactly with the fundamental connections for each "interface" the chip has that were discussed here. Think of the load cap circuitry and PCB layout for XT. Or the few passives and the connector needed to make USB work. Power supply and ADC decoupling. JTAG. And so on. The idea is definitely not to reproduce/duplicate a bunch of information but rather to give customers a good starting point and then link over to additional in-depth material as needed (for example, an XTAL oscillator best-practices app note, or a user’s guide chapter). We should see such improvements in datasheets for newly released products onwards from the middle or later this year.
Andreas
Applications Manager
MSP New Product Development