What is the range of products covered? Do you cover plastics materials and components, for example? These types of services have been available almost since the Internet debuted, but for some reason many fail to get a lot of traction. It seems that the datasheets offer such a superficial view of products' capabilities (particularly plastics) that they almost do more harm then good if they are being used extensively by a novice engineer who doesn't know where the traps are. Izod impact data on datasheets is a good example. How often will a component encounter impact under ideal (tensile bar) conditions of an ISO or ASTM test? Rarely. There is always heat, contact with solvents or other chemicals, fatigue, or some other factor to deal with. Components have to be tested and evaluated on a log scale. And that's assuming the part is perfectly made from an isotropic and stress point of view!
Hi Douglas, right now it's focused on Electronic devices, from resistors, capacitors and inductors, through to processors. Of course, we may be able to expand upon what we cover, what do you, or your fellow engineers think? Is there a need for such an expansion? How are you currently being served in this area?
One of the questions I have about a service like this is whether it offers more than traditional component distributors. Distributors have been in competition in recent years to provide a wide range of Web-based info services, including tons of environmental compliance support. Distributors such as Avnet and Arrow grabbed much of this market from the early dot-com plays. But the market has changed. Maybe there is room for this play.
Rob, Product Marketing Manager from SiliconExpert here (the data service behind Datasheets.com). The true value for a site like datasheets.com comes from normalizing the data between manufacturers & distributors in the industry. Manually culling through datasheets, product pages and shopping carts from several part manufacturer or distributor websites is a time consuming process.
On datasheets.com, part selection decisions can be made faster by design engineers & component engineers by searching through parametric features of a category that has been "normalized" and comparing the parts without having to open dozens of datasheets in different formats. Datasheet.com's compare parts feature accomplishes this quite well.
There will always be a demand for environmental compliance, lifecycle / obsolescence information or other data points on electronic components. These data points are already provided by subscription based services in the industry and the key players offering this data do their job well. Datasheets.com, however, provides a basic level of electronic component data to engineers & buyers for free.
Hope you're able to test the waters on the site if you haven't had a chance yet. Let me know your opinion or any feedback.
Are there 3D models of the parts available on the service? I know design engineers talk about the need to look at the 3D model of a particular component within the context of their evolving 3D digital design so they can check for interferences, etc. That would go a long way in terms of simplfying the design process.
Beth, we're definitely looking at all avenues to improve the content on the site in the next few months. Will keep your suggestion in mind during these discussions. So the answer really is "there is more to come."
What is the revenue source for this service, considering that it is free to the users. Do the companies who's products are featured need to pay to get them listed?
Hi Jack, the datafeed from the manufacturers and distributors is free, the revenue comes from 'buy now' buttons and ads around the site. Best regards, Patrick.
I was just trying to review your microcontroller list and all I found was company, bus and core. I think having items like "how many programmable I/O pins are available" would be a great addition. We need to have as large as possible the number of choices in the search criteria to choose from.
this is just one of several datasheet websites that has appeared recently. All claiming to be the best. It would be nice if someone from Design News would do an actual comparison between searches on the better ones.
datasheets.com looks great but registration and logging in is a pain. 185 million parts - that sounds great too but not one hit with several searches. Is the website just aimed for parametric selection.. that makes some sense but it isn't clear.
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