There Is a New Way to Cross Reference Electronic Passive Components, and You Should Be Familiar With It
Capacitors are a simple 2 terminal passive electronic components that takes over 25% of each PCB bill of material.
When conducting electronic component sourcing, its not only important to look at pricing and availability but also focus on technical reuqiments.
Sourcing of electronic components is tough in Covid times and you should continuously allocate datasheets that can replace existing BOM parts
Capacitors usually used to suppress voltage increases in PCBA design for manufacturing, other uses can be for filtering and storing energy in high frequency product designs.
This is a daily use that involved alot of offering over there, SourcingBot takes the technical aspect of that and provides immediate existing real time market analysis of who are the suppliers who can provide that, combining that with real time stock and pricing information is whats creating this process really automated.
Analysing over 50 manufacturers is costly and tiresome, most of the time off the shelf product will answer design requirements, those are cheap and usually are available online. At lower costs, depending of course of MOQ for your request for quote.
SourcingBot provides 5 alternatives at hand for over 800,000 capacitors in the market so you can choose your preferred manufacturers and also compare them at an operating point level frequencies and voltages.
Usually I use lists from past designs, Excel sheets, in-house databases or simple 2nd source tools but those solutions break when a new capacitor or capacitor type is used which is not listed yet.
A simple way to conduct sourcing Risk management and consolidate your sourcing
My BOM robustness is crucial to keeping costs down and avoid shortages that are very common in todays supply chaing sourcing decisions. It is a known best paractce to find sufficient 2nd or 3rd sources.
If I need more technical options, Sourcingbot also offers me an expert mode. I can adjust the cross-search for more application specific requirements like exact footprint match, tighter tolerances, smaller footprint or even Automotive requirements. All this help is available on their website and via API. Their service is free-of-charge, easy to use and helps me to save a lot of research time to make my BOM designs robust.
At this moment Sourcingbot stepped-in me narrow down my market offering, with their new and recently rolled-out capacitor cross-reference tool.
Adding the pricing and relevant distributors made this process an easy and simple one and Second, an advanced for different usage/perspective cases. The simple version gives me the Top 5 capacitor matches in a simple table provides the main technical specifications that can assist in quick decision making. Adding to that their difference with a single simple view. The actual product match is shown in a simple-score, the matching score. Filters are pre-adjusted to give me the best balance between the number of similar/exact product matches and a reasonable number of matches to choose from.