(Natasha Baker, the founder and CEO of SnapEDA, briefed LEDinside the role of the online parts library in the electronics industry.)
What can be more frustrating than creating PCB footprints and schematic symbols all from scratches for an engineer during component development?
Technology progresses, and the way of making it should be smarter, too. With the continuous scaling semiconductor and CMOS technology, the circuitry becomes more intricate, and PCB designs more compact and complicated, possibly leading to more time inefficiently spent on creating and collecting electronic design data with schematic and PCB design tools with a broad range of models and symbols enough to tire out engineers. That had propelled Natasha Baker to derail from her former electronic design product marketing job and found SnapEDA.
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(Image: SnapEDA) |
Companies outsource parts of their business, component manufacturing, for example, to secure more time and cost for more advanced innovations. Likewise, it would be much more helpful and efficient to let someone professional create for them information about parts they seek or desire. It’s a space new but definitely necessary for the fast-paced and ever-advancing technology sector.
With up to 2,500 large and small firms and over 60,000 electronics engineers from fields across aerospace engineering, semiconductor design, electronic and optical component development registering with it, online CAD library SnapEDA serves as a platform collecting parts, managing and providing well-organized information from schematic models, PCB footprints to 3D models at the disposal of engineers to begin their hardware design. All details of a part, registered by its supplier, can be found with a simple search.
Here LEDinside has the top three most-searched lighting parts from Lite-On, Avago, and Lumex. These screenshots show, apart from main information such as symbols and footprints, the availability, package types, and prices of the three LED packages. The pages also give additional information such as quantity of those parts and lead buyers to vendors, including Digi-Key, Mouser, Arrow, and Avnet.
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(Images: SnapEDA) |
All information is downloadable to a myriad of EDA platforms from Eagle, Altium, KiCad, and Pulsonix to Mentor PADS, DX Designer, OrCAD, and Allegro. The SnapEDA team ensures designers can really harness the resources on each platform by expanding components’ format portfolio when only offered a few formats, which enables the parts library to reach a much larger developer community. In addition to that, SnapEDA just partnered with Global Connector Technology (GCT), a UK-based developer of lighting connectors, to enable faster design of smart lighting systems.
Manufacturers can also hand over their new components to the SnapEDA team to complete their new profiles. All new parts will be assessed by SnapEDA’s patent-pending automated verification checker before their profiles are created and uploaded on the library.
Leveraging resources provided by SnapEDA save much time for companies during the process of product design. Developers can find it so much easier designing PCBs and connecting them with various components especially when 3D models make clear how much space is taken. It not only speeds up the design but is able to start earlier the mass production of a product. In the long run, that helps reduce production cost and could actually allow companies to focus more on pitching ideas for new innovations or marketing products, which, particularly for the world that’s craving for new smart lighting technology, is truly valuable.
(Written by Evangeline Huang, Editor, LEDinside)
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