Nexperia Reimagines Component Sourcing With Interactive Datasheets

One of the most important—yet burdensome—tasks in electronic design is component selection. Designers must sort through large component databases, often scouring over datasheets and extrapolating information in the interest of a specific circuit.

 

Nexperia has launched its Interactive Datasheets tool.

 

Because this sifting and interpreting process can be a tedious task, Nexperia has develped a new approach to component selection. This week, the company unveiled its “Interactive Datasheets,” a tool designed to make component selection more intuitive and straightforward for designers.

 

Selecting Components With Datasheets

To select an electronic component, designers often read component datasheets to understand how the part will perform in a particular circuit. Deriving dense technical information from a datasheet can be difficult and time-consuming, however. Within a datasheet is a plethora of different parameters, many of which vary based on operating conditions. Designers must manually calculate how information in the datasheet will behave in their circuit designs. 

Additionally, many of the components listed in a datasheet tend to be interrelated; changing the conditions for one variable might impact a handful of others. This makes it confusing to understand the relationship between components and can lead to inaccurate assumptions about the component’s real-world behavior. While this standard process of component selection certainly works, it may contribute to wasted time in the design process.

 

Nexperia’s Interactive Datasheet

To address these issues, yesterday Nexperia launched its Interactive Datasheets. A patented technology, Interactive Datasheets allow designers to adjust parameters and setpoints and see how the component’s behavior changes accordingly. Using sliders in the datasheet, designers can dynamically adjust circuit conditions such as voltage, current, and temperature to see how the component under evaluation is impacted.

 

Screen capture of Nexperia's live interactive datasheet tool. Using the slide bars you can, for example, adjust temperature and see how drain current changes at 5.0 V_GS. (Click image to enlarge)

 

Interactive Datasheets are a form of graphical user interface (GUI) that interfaces directly with a circuit simulator. In addition to showing component behavior versus circuit conditions, the Interactive Datasheets also give designers greater insight into components by demonstrating the interrelation between different circuit parameters. You try out the tool at this live Interactive Datasheet of an Nexperia's BUK9M12-60E MOSFET.

The goal of this new tool is to help engineers eliminate the time spent in the component selection process so that they can spend more time designing and bringing products to market. So far, Nexperia is only offering this resource for its power MOSFET products, for which the company has already made more than 200 Interactive Datasheets available. In the future, Nexperia plans to expand the feature to more components as well.

 

All images used courtesy of Nexperia