I am working on my first small PCB and I have a good idea of the types of components I need to use. However when I get over to Mouser Electronics and start punching in search criteria, I am often still left with 20-50 results. I understand that there are a number of competing companies with nearly identical product lines, but if all are available to ship, have the same IC package size, and close enough characteristics, How to engineers choose one component over another?
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3\$\begingroup\$ Price is the obvious one. \$\endgroup\$– DKNguyenCommented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:21
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1\$\begingroup\$ Price and nowadays: lead time because it may happen that after "punching in all the search criteria" you are left with 0 stocked items. Unfortunately, I don't think digikey or mouser support sorting by lead time for non-stocked items. \$\endgroup\$– tobaltCommented Jun 7, 2022 at 13:44
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A big driver can be cost even for very similar parts.
Trust in manufacturers can vary. Many are very good, if one of their parts appears not to meet spec, the first question I ask is what am I doing wrong. I have also had the opposite where parts had real design issues. Its hard to regain trust if these issue only show up after hitting production.
Given current worldwide supply issues "in stock" may not be good enough. If part A has 50 in stock and B has 50k in stock, A may (will?) not be in stock next month and B is very attractive.
Other factors for something that will end up in a production environment: Packaging - tube reel etc can be important depending on volumes. Mouser/Digikey etc are generally not normal for volume manufacture. It may be prudent to pick manufacturer that is easy to source in the long run even at the proto stage when buying from Mouser/Digikey.
If there is really several very similar parts then this is ideal for manufacture as they can be listed as alternates in the design, the purchasing people then buy whatever they can out of the valid choices. That is very useful if the product life cycle is long.
