Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1256432
JUNE 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 25 attention to the app note because the alumi- num PCB is very expensive. There's no ques- tion that some app notes are better than oth- ers, but for the most part, if you're going with one of the larger manufacturers, you're prob- ably going to get high-quality app notes. Matties: Are there any collective or crowd- sourced ratings of app notes through your or- ganization? Lipman: I'm totally writing that down (laughs)! That's a spectacular idea, and I'm sure one that our product team has discussed in the past, but we have not discussed it recently. We use "trust signals" as much as we can on the site, and user ratings could certainly find a place in that context. Our priorities for this year include getting more data for app notes and similar types of assets on the website. Collections of app notes are often called cookbooks. In the case of some companies, they put out a newsletter with app notes every month. Those types of documents would also lend themselves to rating systems. Matties: It seems like there's a big need for it, especially as we see younger engineers coming in and engineers with 30–40 years of experi- ence retire "tribal" knowledge," which is hard to pass on. Lipman: Very true. I've dealt with a couple of young companies with less experienced engi- neers, and they lean heavily on app notes and reference designs. It's a classic move to sim- ply copy the design in the app note, and then make small adjustments. It's possible to copy a reference design or use an Arduino or Rasp- berry PI that's probably not optimized for your application, so you can get something running right away. The younger crowd probably leans on that stuff more. Shaughnessy: You're in charge of acquiring it and prioritizing and presenting the data to the users. How do you get hold of your data, and what format is it when you present it? Lipman: It's making sausage, so it's not pret- ty. We get data from many sources. We have partnerships with a number of distributors and manufacturers who send us data in tabular form. We built tools in Octopart that ingest that data and map that data into the Octopart syn- tactical system so that it's compatible and nor- Octoparts provides customers with a range of data for each part.