More alternatives used in markets in Shenzhen China
www.icgoo.net
www.ickey.cn
www.hqew.com
www.szlcsc.com
And for more international parts (still used in mainland a lot)
www.eciaauthorized.com
Octopart is a more generic site for discovering chips and getting an idea of the price, but still it fetches crappy prices from Digikey, Farnell, Mouser, etc.
If your product is being made in China and you are making the design choices, a quick Taobao search (or using the above links) is great to see how popular a part is. Not recommending to buy parts from Taobao though (unless you are more seasoned). There are also alot of agents that can source parts maybe 1-2 levels below the original factory. Their prices are so good it's unbelievable but they are hard to find and validate. Having volume also helps.
Seconding LCSC here, their prices are pretty damn good for chinese market stuff (and for international musthaves they carry pretty good stock), english support is decent and the shipping combo with PCBs from JLCPCB makes it a nobrainer.
The cable itself is easily purchased anywhere, there are countless vendors on AliExpress. But I want the connector so I can get something else custom built.
I always found it strange how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time. Is there any effort at archiving and distributing these pdfs?
In addition to the archiving challenge, just the fact that PDFs are the de facto standard in distributing datasheets makes it very challenging to build knowledge bases like FindChips since it is so unfriendly to parse. There is a huge amount of data variety in these documents in terms of structure, formatting, and language.
> how datasheets are distributed over random websites and ftp servers usually covered in watermarks and could go offline at any time.
There are simply too many vendors' products on the market, only a handful of vendors have a systematic way of providing searchable datasheets online, like Microchip or ST, others simply come and go, so it's extremely hard to obtain an official one.
Worst are the ones that add protection on their pdfs so I can't highlight and add notes to the datasheet. What are they afraid of? In any case, here's how to bypass that (quoting myself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448044
I'm maybe not experienced enough as I only do small electronics projects with a limited set of components which I always use, however, in my limited experience I see typically see datasheets in two places: on the manufacturers website and on the distributors website. For example, if I buy an Microchip EEPROM from Mouser, then the datasheet is typically available both on Mouser's product page and on Microchips documentation page.
I don't know if there's a centralised one (and I'm keen to find out!) but this is why I always save a copy of any datasheet I find at first opportunity and now I have hundreds, filed by manufacturer.
If only sites like this existed when I was doing design work. Really looks quite helpful to have a distributor agnostic site. Not sure about whether the popularity metrics are useful, you might end up using popular chips in the same way you end up with a lot of 10k resistors (old argument that all component values should be calculated and thought about).
Findchips is amazing. They visited our company last year and pitched their software. I gathered a small audience and we learned about what they have to offer. We subscribed and it became immediately apparent their service is essential. In a market with so much allocation, finding stock on parts is made easy with their channel analysis. This is one of the few subscriptions I've ever really felt was fully justified.
FindChips
Oemstrade
Octopart
Chip index
These are all a decade old and easy to find.
I try not to be cynical but if you are trying to source components either as a hobbyist or procurement professional and ARE NOT using one of these easily found sites then you are getting goosed.
> if you are trying to source components either as a hobbyist ... and ARE NOT using one of these easily found sites then you are getting goosed.
Maybe, but my volume is so low and orders so infrequent, it doesn't really matter if I pay $1 for an IC or $0.5, so I usually just go with what either is the most convenient (eg sparkfun breakout boards) or the quickest shipping (Farnell has free next day delivery for me). Having said that, these sites are great resources and I do check every now and again.
It's nice, but it doesn't tell me all that much I can't get from other sources like Octopart
What does "parts popularity" mean, anyway? You probably don't have sales volume. Number of distributors? Part popularity is actually useful; you want to design using popular parts when possible, to avoid supply problems. Seeed Studio is big on that; that's why they have a recommended parts list of parts they can easily get in Shenzhen.
> you want to design using popular parts when possible, to avoid supply problems.
How does this design strategy actually avoid supply problems, e.g. when a component manufacturer issues EOL notice, what stops professional logistics/procurement staff at Big Fish Corp--whose design activities were likely responsible for the supply glut to begin with--from pushing lifetime buys to ensure sustainment of their product line, instantly draining global authorized distributor stock overnight?
Professionally, a much more important question is how can I trust this data? Any perceived convenience in data aggregation strikes me as all for naught if specific details will require corroboration from the horse's mouth anyways before having sufficient confidence to make a design/procurement decision. Otherwise, it's a nice resource to leverage if its inherent risks are within your comfort zone.
In my experience the reason why one learns expensive lesson (happened to me also and it was the only case when I had to respin board due to wrong footprint) is that you just end up thinking "this is too simple to get wrong".
I had my share of shipped products with extensive manual rework, professionally made bodge boards and respins of 3ft square boards (which there were enough that the board does not use letters for revisions, but timestamps of when the gerbers were exported), but it usually involved questionable component choices and attempts to route what should be controlled impedance diffpair across 10s of centimeters of two layer board and cheapest connectors we could get, but really the only case of respin due to wrong footprint involved measly BC840 NPN transistor with rotated pinout... (on the other hand hand soldering the transistor involved at the 45deg angle solved the issue for first batch which was hand assembled anyway :))
This tool seems to have similar information as Silicon Expert - which is pretty expensive but has a nice system where you plug in your BOM and it gives you the part risk, RoHS status, and possible alternatives if available.
Nice site. By the way, does anyone know the easiest way to get points to download datasheets off CSDN? Using chinese services internationally is so hard...
[+] [-] dazhbog|7 years ago|reply
www.icgoo.net
www.ickey.cn
www.hqew.com
www.szlcsc.com
And for more international parts (still used in mainland a lot)
www.eciaauthorized.com
Octopart is a more generic site for discovering chips and getting an idea of the price, but still it fetches crappy prices from Digikey, Farnell, Mouser, etc.
If your product is being made in China and you are making the design choices, a quick Taobao search (or using the above links) is great to see how popular a part is. Not recommending to buy parts from Taobao though (unless you are more seasoned). There are also alot of agents that can source parts maybe 1-2 levels below the original factory. Their prices are so good it's unbelievable but they are hard to find and validate. Having volume also helps.
[+] [-] SuperPaintMan|7 years ago|reply
I use them for my keyboards[0] and love them!
[0] https://www.gboards.ca/
[+] [-] hyc_symas|7 years ago|reply
The cable itself is easily purchased anywhere, there are countless vendors on AliExpress. But I want the connector so I can get something else custom built.
[+] [-] schappim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baroffoos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lwhsiao|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|7 years ago|reply
There are simply too many vendors' products on the market, only a handful of vendors have a systematic way of providing searchable datasheets online, like Microchip or ST, others simply come and go, so it's extremely hard to obtain an official one.
[+] [-] retSava|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkersten|7 years ago|reply
I guess this isn't always the case?
[+] [-] roland35|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|7 years ago|reply
But then again, errata are constantly being updated. That evergreen http link might end up being the best resource.
What do?
[+] [-] lvs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itazula|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softgrow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsined|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatherders|7 years ago|reply
I try not to be cynical but if you are trying to source components either as a hobbyist or procurement professional and ARE NOT using one of these easily found sites then you are getting goosed.
[+] [-] dkersten|7 years ago|reply
Maybe, but my volume is so low and orders so infrequent, it doesn't really matter if I pay $1 for an IC or $0.5, so I usually just go with what either is the most convenient (eg sparkfun breakout boards) or the quickest shipping (Farnell has free next day delivery for me). Having said that, these sites are great resources and I do check every now and again.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
What does "parts popularity" mean, anyway? You probably don't have sales volume. Number of distributors? Part popularity is actually useful; you want to design using popular parts when possible, to avoid supply problems. Seeed Studio is big on that; that's why they have a recommended parts list of parts they can easily get in Shenzhen.
[+] [-] metaphor|7 years ago|reply
How does this design strategy actually avoid supply problems, e.g. when a component manufacturer issues EOL notice, what stops professional logistics/procurement staff at Big Fish Corp--whose design activities were likely responsible for the supply glut to begin with--from pushing lifetime buys to ensure sustainment of their product line, instantly draining global authorized distributor stock overnight?
[+] [-] max232d|7 years ago|reply
More: https://hackaday.com/2013/09/09/how-findchips-started-as-a-n...
[+] [-] metaphor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Itsdijital|7 years ago|reply
I learned a very lengthy and expensive lesson trusting something as simple as a 3 pin SOT23 transistor.
[+] [-] dfox|7 years ago|reply
I had my share of shipped products with extensive manual rework, professionally made bodge boards and respins of 3ft square boards (which there were enough that the board does not use letters for revisions, but timestamps of when the gerbers were exported), but it usually involved questionable component choices and attempts to route what should be controlled impedance diffpair across 10s of centimeters of two layer board and cheapest connectors we could get, but really the only case of respin due to wrong footprint involved measly BC840 NPN transistor with rotated pinout... (on the other hand hand soldering the transistor involved at the 45deg angle solved the issue for first batch which was hand assembled anyway :))
[+] [-] metaphor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roland35|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] equalunique|7 years ago|reply
Do you mind explaining a little what "part risk" means?
[+] [-] techplex|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryrc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|7 years ago|reply
The ones I know of so far are Seeedstudio, Macrofab, PCBway, Bittetle (7pcb), and Oshpark. But all of them either only do the boards or both.
[+] [-] jpwright|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] max232d|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjeli|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juhq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cr0sh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Uhrheber|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LAMike|7 years ago|reply
I tried two different emails... looking forward to using your service!
[+] [-] Orlan|7 years ago|reply
Does your company name have any non-alphanumeric characters? I removed the "&" from mine and was able to register.