EOL research

Hi,

You can just sort the spreadsheet alphabetically, and highlight all rows between marvell and NXP, or just "maxim" if you want a more accurate result.

cheers, Jamie

Silicon Expert seems alright, mind, I've merely used it, not paid for it... :-)

Seems to be the way to go for ~1000s/yr production. Most of your products are a lot less than that, no? Probably better off sitting an intern in front of Octopart or what have you.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design Website:

We have about 7000 different parts in stock and 1500 BOMs. This needs to be automated.

I guess we could exclude the passives and such and get down to maybe

I know there are services that do this. I was wondering if anyone here had experience with any. One of my customers uses one and still has chronic EOL problems.

Well, yeah. No one can tell you what your compatible substitutes are, certainly not just from BOM level alone.

These services can only tell you what's going EOL. At best, they can also suggest hopefully-similar-enough-not-to-matter equivalents, or alternate part numbers you may not've considered (but that may come with e.g. different reel size or other packing, lead finish, temp range, etc.).

The purpose is not to free one of EOLs, that is impossible. You're complaining about existence itself, if that's what you're complaining about. The purpose is simply to amplify the effort of your employees driving the process.

Tim

Our parts database lists several acceptable mfr/mpns for each in-house part number. Unfortunately, sometimes there is only one. A service could keep checking and inform us of *any* mfr/mpn that is going EOL. That's something that we couldn't reasonably do ourselves for thousands of parts. We *could* reasonably follow up on their alerts.

Yes. We can then decide what to do.

That would be helpful, but that's not the hard part. Given enough time, we could qualify an equivalent part, buy a giant stock, or redesign.

I wasn't complaining, I was asking if anyone uses one of those services. The question seemed to be on-topic to me. I complain when Maxim kills parts that are on order, and we find out they are EOL when they don't arrive. I suppose no service can help us with that.

MAX9690 did that to us. MAX1474 is EOL, and nobody at Maxim even recognizes the part number any more. We got no EOL notice for either; the notice is that you can't get them.

MAX809 is a great part, as long as you buy it from TI or ON.

I knew that.

Our company uses IHS. Our whole obsolete parts strategy is tied into this t ool. We have a full time employee who works obsolete parts. He said the ser vice includes a parameter search tool that is good for finding alternates. I think the biggest service they provide is making sure you get the last ti me buy notices from the manufacturers. This part system is mandated at cor porate. The guy who uses it says he is happy with it. As an engineer last year i would say 15% of my efforts went into obsolete parts issues. Our com pany has to have lots of protection against counterfeit parts which may be why this tool is mandated by corporate. Although this is not the biggest d efense against counterfeits.

Does IHS actively inform you about EOL parts? Does it know which parts you use?

We're a small company, so we can't afford to have a person working this problem full-time. We could afford to have people follow up on EOL alerts generated by an outfit that surveys the industry for a number of clients.

ON offers it in SC-70-3 SOT-323 package. My new favorite small 3-pin package. Saves space, and with pins 1.3mm apart, even OK for hand soldering.

s tool. We have a full time employee who works obsolete parts. He said the service includes a parameter search tool that is good for finding alternate s. I think the biggest service they provide is making sure you get the last time buy notices from the manufacturers. This part system is mandated at corporate. The guy who uses it says he is happy with it. As an engineer la st year i would say 15% of my efforts went into obsolete parts issues. Our company has to have lots of protection against counterfeit parts which may be why this tool is mandated by corporate. Although this is not the bigges t defense against counterfeits.

I believe the answer to both of those questions is Yes.

It may be better to look at their site and decide for yourself. The guy wh o takes care of this for our company said there are several services out th ere but he does not have familiarity with them.

I sometimes drive them from a voltage divider from the main power rail, 24V from a wart or something. Or have one check multiple rails.

Their giant "contact us" form doesn't work. It doesn't like my phone number or something. That's common these days.

Digikey use to send me EOL notices. I don't know if they still do that.

George H.

I wonder if one could write a program that pings Digikey and finds EOL parts. It could read a local file of part numbers, ping Digikey, and make a report. Somebody could sell that.

I'll ask Digikey if they have some inquiry protocol.

Digikey has maybe the best cross-vendor parts database.

and it appear you can access it with your own programs:

One of my customers does. They wanted us to get the software, but it's $$$ so I said no.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Don't you get PCN/PDN emails from distributors?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sometimes. Most of the (few) that I see tell me something academic, like some change of wirebond country or things like that.

I'd just like a more deliberate process.

One of my customers uses two such services, but they don't seem to follow up, so they have EOL crisies. They use mostly contract assemblers, so don't stock parts themselves, and the CMs have no incentive to buy and hold parts past building for current orders.

Using the Digikey API looks interesting. I'll have one of my Python kiddies look into that.

On Friday, March 15, 2019 at 9:51:01 PM UTC-4, Lasse Langwadt Christensen w rote:

erspective

Nice, thanks. So if you ordered a part in the last 36 months they'll send you an EOL or PCN. That sounds right. We usually run into issues with parts we ordered ~10+ years ago.

George H.