
FindChips – Get instant insight into any electronic component - peter_d_sherman
https://www.findchips.com/
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dazhbog
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.

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SuperPaintMan
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.

I use them for my keyboards[0] and love them!

[0] [https://www.gboards.ca/](https://www.gboards.ca/)

~~~
StavrosK
Can you order just a few components, for hobbyists, or are they for big runs?
I'm thinking 50-100 resistors and such, for making one or two of whatever I'm
making.

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serialx
They also sell cut tape. So you can order from 1 to 100 parts. There are
however some parts that have MOQ of ~50, but those are so cheap that 100 of
them would be less than 10 USD.

~~~
StavrosK
That's exactly what I need, thanks!

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baroffoos
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?

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lwhsiao
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.

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bb88
For whatever reason footprints, pinouts, and dimensions have been distributed
via pdfs as the de facto standard, leading to a bunch of wasted work as people
have to create their own foot prints, symbols, and 3d models over and over
again.

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henrikeh
It might seem wasted, but the reality is that a “standard” footprint does not
really make sense. Soldering and assembly is not a perfect craft and it
requires hundreds of considerations to methods used, environment of use,
desired reliability etc. for example look up the footprint differences for
wave soldering compared to hand soldering. For aerospace use reliability is
king, for mobile devices space is a premium.

Furthermore, there aren’t really any standards for packages and hence it is
difficult to trust foorprints. A TSOP package from one manufacturer
manufacturer is not necessarily the same as a TSOP package from another. This
is not a hypothetical — I’ve been bitten by this.

There are tools to assist in and automate a lot of this, but since most of the
time is spend on other parts of a product it simply isn’t very critical.

~~~
henrikeh
An appendix.

A lot of good stuff has begun to happen in this regard. At least KiCad has a
large and pretty decent quality collection of footprints; I think other tools
are making similar efforts.

However, I wish they would make it easy to adjust these footprints or make
derivatives of them, without having to essentially redraw them.

For a looong time I’ve wanted to apply geometric constraint solving to drawing
footprints. This would allow for having a base footprint which defines the
constraints and then parameter files could introduce the specific dimensions
needed. I’ve been working on it at [https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-
ecad](https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad) and the parts are there, but
I’d love to collaborate on it with someone :-)

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marcosdumay
For a long while geda's pcb used mostly parametrized footprints written in M4.
People mostly hated them.

If one is wandering into that path, the hardest problem to solve is defining a
good language/library in what people can describe them.

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itazula
Very nice. My current method is limited to looking at various sites like
[http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/default.aspx](http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/default.aspx)
(I live in Tokyo). It's nice to visit their Akihabara store too:
[http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/contents2/akiba.aspx](http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/contents2/akiba.aspx)
It's interesting to compare listings, e.g. for part 2SC945L-K-T92-K:
[http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/g/gI-11428/](http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/g/gI-11428/)
and
[https://www.findchips.com/detail/2SC945L-K-T92-K/4317462-Uni...](https://www.findchips.com/detail/2SC945L-K-T92-K/4317462-Unisonic%20Technologies%20Co%20Ltd?quantity=1)

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softgrow
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).

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unsined
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.

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goatherders
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.

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dkersten
> 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.

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Animats
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.

~~~
metaphor
> 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?

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crispyambulance
yes, EOL's and ECN's pop-up a lot. Sometimes it's nothing (a pin-compatible
alternative exists), sometimes it's a nightmare requiring a design change.

At my work, we have seats with SiliconExpert, this is a tool that you can use
to get availability "risk assessments" for your BOM among other things like
RoHS stuff and conflict minerals status.

I've never seen an "overnight global supply draining" occur for a part. There
are distributors that make a living buying up millions of components
throughout their lifecycle and then sell them for ~20X their cost (or higher)
when the part goes EOL. It might be annoying, but these vendors can keep you
going until a suitable replacement is located, designed-in, qualified and
rolled out to production.

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max232d
Findchips was started by Randy Sargent in 1998
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-
sargent-a93535/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-sargent-a93535/)

More: [https://hackaday.com/2013/09/09/how-findchips-started-as-
a-n...](https://hackaday.com/2013/09/09/how-findchips-started-as-a-nasa-
engineers-hack/)

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metaphor
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.

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Itsdijital
Make sure to double check any CAD models you pull off sites like this.

I learned a very lengthy and expensive lesson trusting something as simple as
a 3 pin SOT23 transistor.

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dfox
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 :))

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roland35
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.

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equalunique
>it gives you the part risk

Do you mind explaining a little what "part risk" means?

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roland35
Risk in this context is how likely the part will go out of stock or "end of
life"-ed. If a part has no alternatives it is even more risky!

When I designed a large board oftentimes several of the tiny parts such as
capacitors or resistors would go out of stock but this generally is not a
problem if you are using a common part. If you have a good contract
manufacturer you can flag any parts like these as "use equivalent OK" and they
will automatically pick a new part for you if necessary, with the same or
better ratings.

Some companies also use their own internal part numbers for each electronic
component (like a 10k 0805 resistor will be part AB1235) so then they can map
that AB1235 part number to a list of acceptable manufacturer part numbers.
That seems like too much work for me though!

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techplex
Nice alternative to [https://octopart.com](https://octopart.com)

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colechristensen
Whelp, I didn't know this existed but it both validates and de-motivates an
idea I had for a side project recently.

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coryrc
Just wait until you hear about Octopart!

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trancilo
Thanx. ublock is blocking FindChips. Octopart looks great.

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antoniuschan99
Is there a good PCB assembly Fab that you would recommend? Eg. I get my boards
from JLCPCB but now need to get it assembled.

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.

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jpwright
[https://www.smallbatchassembly.com/](https://www.smallbatchassembly.com/)

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max232d
How would you use data like this:
[https://www.findchips.com/detail/tlc555cd/2477-Texas%20Instr...](https://www.findchips.com/detail/tlc555cd/2477-Texas%20Instruments?quantity=1)

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rjeli
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...

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juhq
Adblock blocks all the buy now buttons..

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cr0sh
Interesting - tried a 2n3055 - lotsa stuff listed; tried it's complementary
(2n2955) - zippo...

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keithnz
hmm, I'm finding ublock origin is blocking most of the links when I click on
componnents

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Uhrheber
Same here. As always, you're paying with your privacy.

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LAMike
> Registration is denied.

I tried two different emails... looking forward to using your service!

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Orlan
I also got the "Registration is denied" error multiple times with no other
error messages.

Does your company name have any non-alphanumeric characters? I removed the "&"
from mine and was able to register.

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pmorici
I prefer octopart for this sort of thing.

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somada141
Very impressive collection!

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thsealienbstrds
For a second I thought this was a search engine for the edible kind of chips.

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tomglynch
There's an absolute fuckton of components listed here. Very helpful.

