Panasonic JFETs going away?

I think you're right. Digikey has many different Panasonic JFET's in their inventory (probably a good chunk of a million parts spread over a couple dozen part numbers) but all are listed as "non-stock". And when the oxymoron of parts in inventory but being "non stock" happens that mostly means that new ones will never be coming. I'm not sure I've ever seen that happen to something with such a high stock status over a wide ranging family of parts.

Maybe it's a marketing move. Maybe Panasonic had been using the "toothpaste shelf space" tack with JFET's where they have hundreds of different 2SK JFET variants, and that might've been good for the 90's era supply chain that it simply doesn't measure up to the simplicity of putting the J310/U310 everywhere (which is what I've always done, perhaps out of ignorance!).

When they're done there might be a much simpler part number scheme from Panasonic. Like Homer Simpson said: "Whenever there are so many species that people get confused and angry a poacher is born"

Tim.

And NEC dumped most of their PHEMTS!

John

They also dumped some capacitor lines too.

Cheers

Get'em while you still can. That's what I did when National discontinued some of their driver chips and when Plessey went under (bought a small stash of their fabulous SL6440 mixers).

Who knows, 20 years from now when some desparation has set in people might be banging on your door, begging you :-)

Digikey currently stocks J310s and J308s, probably other old Siliconix devices. NXP is the manufacturer.

NXP is still making JFETs, but it seems like nobody's buying that many, so how long they'll last is unknown. I hope it's a looong time, because there are lots of things you can do with BF862s that you can't do any other way that I know of. A BF862 follower driving a low noise bipolar op amp makes a really great front end building block--1 nV noise, 2 pF capacitance, zilch input current, at least 100 MHz bandwidth.

I was mostly kidding when I talked about buying reels of BF862s as a retirement investment, but I may get a few just to make sure--they're only 20 cents each, and at 3000 per reel, a few reels will make quite a lot of front ends. Losing two manufacturers and half of another one makes me a bit edgy about it!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Anyone know what a J2086 jfet is? It's in a Fluke 8505A ca. 1985. A datasheet would be great. I do not know the Mfr. It is called out as a N-Ch HV jfet in a to-92 pkg.

Thanks, tm