Has anyone dealt with Avnet? or NuHorizons when trying to purchase Xilinx stuff

Distributors are order takers. I don't call them until I know what I want. Example: "I would like budgetary pricing on 1000 pieces of an XYZ123-3 for delivery in March 2009 "

But do your homework first. Check relative prices/options with Digikey. Research the boards yourself on-line. Read the manuals. Look at the schematics. Etc.

-- Mike Treseler

I used to deal a lot with Avnet at work. If there is a potential for significant design-ins (i.e. a real production run) they offer quite a lot beyond just peddling chips. I've gotten a great deal of Xilinx help from Avnet FAEs at times the Xilinx FAEs were stretched too thin to respond to my problems in a timely manner. They have folks who specialize in other chip vendors as well (TI, Micron, Actel, etc.) as well as discretes and analog stuff (I'm sure more, these are just the areas I've experienced). Their FAEs are pretty knowledgeable, and especially they know how to get answers for questions they can't answer themselves. :-)

All in all, at least for our size company Avnet was very good to work with (alas we have been decimated by our parent company so there's not a lot of reason for the Avnet guys to come around anymore ...).

Hope this helps!

ken

Raban wrote:

Distributors nowadays are pushed to fairly tight margins so you may find won't a lot of interest in a low volume, low value, projects. Digikey mentioned elsewhere is good if you are in the small numbers production and even have stock in many cases. Stock is a rarer item at both NuHorizons and Silica/Avnet but sometimes they do have items. We use all three of these distributors can particularly fault any of them and use whatever one is most suitable for any given project.

Distributors also like to "claim" projects as they get paid a margin on any project they support and hence all the questions they ask. If you want minimm hassle in this respect then Digikey wins. If you are on a high volume project then Nuhorizons or Silica will be the better open for volume purchases.

John Adair Enterpo> Hello,

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In article , John Adair writes: |> Distributors nowadays are pushed to fairly tight margins so you may |> find won't a lot of interest in a low volume, low value, projects. |> Digikey mentioned elsewhere is good if you are in the small numbers |> production and even have stock in many cases.

My experience with Digikey was a bit doubtful with respect to the "freshness" of their stock. The first delivery of a few XC3S1600 in late 2006 was OK, so I built my first prototypes, they worked perfect. The chips in the second delivery in early 2007 had huge problems with the DCM. Either it didn't work at all or a phase shift step killed it.

It took a while until I discovered that they had sent me A0-revisions. In A0 the DCM is (IMO) quite useless as the maximum input and output frequency is only