[quailfarmer]

I think you’re in an uncanny valley where you want to have those powerful search features, but haven’t realized you probably wouldn’t actually use them. For ubiquitous passives, the DK search has all the relevant requirements, and then I’m just picking the manufacturer I have a relationship with. The supply chain on a single passive isn’t worth the headache to save a few percent.

Aside from passives though, you’re never going to get exactly what you want from any reasonably bounded database. For a FET you’re trading footprint, thermal impedance (both up and down), SOA, parasitic capacitances, turn on times.

When I’m picking a key part, I’ll start with a DK search, get a sense for which MFGs are leading the field, make a list of 10 or so parts that look promising, and go through the material on each, filling out my own spreadsheet as I go.

That’s even more true for anything with digital logic, where it wouldn’t be possible to sort by the enumerated features in a meaningful way.

[mitthrowaway2]

I know I'd use them, because I've had to script them myself. Often this comes into play not for random passives, but for key cost-driving components: a big pulse-capable capacitor (eg. for spot-welding), power mosfet, a precision differential amp, and so on. You can end up in a design space where the one-piece component you want is super expensive and rare, but if you make the same thing out of two or three or twenty parts, you can use cheaper and more common components, and benefit from higher volume pricing to boot.

Gate capacitance is a great example because if I'm considering MOSFETs in parallel I'll want to bound the sum of their capacitances. Again, easy to do with expressions, hard with DK's interface.

What other sites do (eg. TI) is have a bunch of extra search fields but make them collapsible.

[sheepshear]

Optimizing Digikey prices is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? They're expensive because they're fast.

Also, specs aren't well standardized between manufacturers. TI has some good videos explaining what their power MOSFET specs mean and how those definitions vary across the industry.

Automatic optimization can only get you so far.

[mitthrowaway2]

Aware of all this but none of it justifies a poor part search experience. And this isn't pinching pennies; sometimes we're talking about a two order of magnitude cost difference, especially when your initial hoped-for specs result in just a few options that are all rare military-grade things. Furthermore usually, if part A is $10 on digikey and part B is $1, then even when you find a different supplier or order direct from manufacturers, part B will usually be cheaper than part A on a relative basis, even if the price difference becomes something like $2 vs $0.50.

If there's a part that would have worked better, but you weren't able to find it, that's a problem with search.

Furthermore, cost is just as an example, the same applies if you're looking to minimize package size, temperature rise, power loss, etc. Any component selection is an optimization process and ideally, a good search and filtering will enable you to sort for exactly the specs you need to find the best component candidates more quickly. Maybe that doesn't mean filtering by price, but by (voltage*quiescent current + conduction loss + switching loss), and so on. Or (rise time + propagation delay), etc. Of course you still need to read the datasheet to make sure. We're just talking about better search to find the parts that meet your actual requirement. The point of good search is it should do the mechanical work for you of finding parts, rather than making you try different parameter combinations again and again by hand.

Digikey is still the best, but that doesn't even mean it's good.

[sheepshear]

Maybe a better way of phrasing what I'm trying to say is it sounds like you're relying too much on metadata search for what you're trying to accomplish. I agree that the search is bad for the way you're using it.

[mitthrowaway2]

You say that like there's something almost un-professional about aspiring to sort a list of capacitors by stored energy.

[sheepshear]

Does scripting get the job done for you? You're at the point where everyone has different objectives and methods, so it's no surprise that you have to make your own solution.