Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1478618
38 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2022 demand signal. ey're both intended to give stakeholders a view of where the things stand today relative to history for availability of com- ponents and how challenging it might be to source components. Shaughnessy: It was interesting to me that it had a running historical ledger of where parts were. How far back does it go? How granular can you get? Give us some details. Schoenfelder: e report itself, and the indi- ces that are a part of it, are pegged to a base- line of January 2020. We intentionally did that because it's pre-pandemic and probably the closest thing that any of us can remember to what was normal. e reports that we generate monthly show two years of history compared to January 2020. In the EDDI, you'll find that we look at an aggregate signal for both demand and supply, but then we break it down further into key categories. ese nine categories include inte- grated circuits, passives, and discrete semicon- ductors, among others. Shaughnessy: at's really good. I'm curious where this idea came from. Schoenfelder: We had this idea to give back to the industry some of the analytics that we're able to capture. Under the Altium umbrella, we have design tools, a powerful API, and Octopart, the component search engine. All these different user experiences have user interactions with data. e EDDI takes those interactions and signals of intent that data exhaust, and aggregates and normalizes that into a product that shows trends in demand and supply relevant to stakeholders of the elec- tronic component space. Shaughnessy: I imagine a lot of this comes through Octopart, right? Schoenfelder: Most definitely; portions of the EDDI are fortified by Octopart, such as inven- tory trends and search activity. Shaughnessy: And Nexar also includes other search engines, so you've got a wide universe to cull this data from. Schoenfelder: at's a good point. We like to talk about our signals as having both breadth and depth. Octopart itself sees several mil- lion unique visitors per month. e Nexar API receives about 15 million calls per week. So there's significant activity that provides us a broad but granular signal of what's happening in the industry. ere's no question that mar- ket conditions have driven a lot of activity over the last 18 months or so. Shaughnessy: And you're offering this free of charge? Schoenfelder: Yes, the EDDI itself is a free report. You can subscribe at Nexar.com. It comes out monthly, usually around the middle of the month. We also have about 300 subcate- gories that go beyond what's in the free report. So, if users would like to see something that's not represented in the reports, we offer some bespoke reporting. Shaughnessy: Now, you look at this informa- tion all the time. What trends do you see? Schoenfelder: ere are some distinct trends that you can see in the latest editions of the EDDI. Component availability is returning to normal for many product categories. We're We had this idea to give back to the industry some of the analytics that we're able to capture.