Why so many similar components to do the same task? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: Veketti
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2023, 05:32:50 pm
content: Dear All,I've been wondering ever since I got into electronics that why on earth there is so many components with almost the same specifications, even in same manufacturer selection. For example linear regulators from ST offering: LD3985M33R and STLQ015M33R. They both have almost identical specs. Same thing on fets and you name it, zillion similar valued components. Why is it so? If you'd have fewer selection it would be cheaper to maintain and designers to select etc. There must be something that I'm missing. Or is it so that if you don't have thousand different FET's in your selection, nobody takes you seriously?Thank you in advance.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 21, 2023, 06:15:10 pm
content: Maybe one part was manufactured at ST and the other part at another company and at some point ST bought the other company and merged the products - maybe they kept the other part for those customers who validated it and use it in their products and have long term orders for it.Anyway seems there are some differences ... one is 1.5v... 5.5v in, other is 2.5v ... 6v in ... one has some kind of fast turn on circuit and a bypass pin, the other doesn't .. orders of magnitude of quiescent current difference (ex 1uA for one, 85uA for the other)Could also be regulators made under different processes (ex one made on 300nm fab, the other on newer 90nm fab), could be one is better at rejecting noise, one could work better with ceramic capacitors, could be lots of things.

author: Konkedout
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2023, 04:48:54 am
content: This question is complicated and probably has many answers.1) In design engineering the fine points matter. Some critical difference between two parts may not be obvious to you if you do not know where to look.2) Company BigOne introduces a barflebapper component model A10A. They get some customers who design it into products, but some of these customers discover a bug in this barflebapper model A10A. So BigOne introduces barflebapper model A10B. They tell all of their customers to stop ordering barflebapper A10A and to buy A10B instead. But customer BiggerTwo tries it and says "Hey this one does not work in our product called Widgetbapper! We need to have A10A!! But other customers are happy with A10B and they need that one.This is just one scenario that really happens. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

author: MarkT
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2023, 02:40:20 pm
content: Quote from: Veketti on December 21, 2023, 05:32:50 pmIts a good point!The thing is the market is huge, electronics goes into everything around us, most modern cars have literally dozens of microcontrollers, hundreds of PCBs perhaps.Its a big market with lots of competition, everyone is trying to keep up with a moving target, semiconductor technologies improve constantly, and every little niche in the market have different sets of requirements - for automotive use reliability over a wide temperature range is very important, for phones size and power consumption are everything, for space radiation hardness and vibration resistance are important - so for popular chips there can be special versions for particular uses.For IC's they often come in many package sizes, allowing legacy use (the general trend is smaller). Add to that improved versions as semiconductor processes change, die-shrinking (here the goal is often same performance but cheaper to manufacture), and the many hundreds of kinds of chip...And with digital logic the trend is lower and lower voltages, from 5V to 3.3V to 1.8V etc etc, for lower power consumption and faster operation and smaller dies again. Moore's law...