Component Manufacturers that you should stay away from!

[Falcon69]

What manufacturers should I stay away from when ordering from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, or any other big house distributor?

I know that ordering on eBay is a big NoNo from experience when purchasing electronic components. Especially IC chips, as most are fake or from bad stock, bad meaning the manufacture knows that a certain percentage is bad but sells the reel off cheap, and others sell on eBay.

Take resistors and capacitors for example.  Arrow has Samsung Resistors and Capacitors far cheaper then the other manufacturers, but how good are Samsung Chips?

So, list a bad manufacturer of IC Chips, or passive components and list your opinion as to why it is better to spend a few pennies more to purchase from that 'other' manufacturer.

[Dago]

I've heard  the rule to avoid the three M. Microchip, Maxim and Micrel, all known for bad availability apparently.

I personally don't have that much experience except that I DID get burned by a Microchip step-down converter chip that has had pretty bad availability almost constantly.

For electrolytic caps I usually use Panasonic, Nichicon, Rubycon or Chemicon (but not Kemet or Multicomp or any of that crap).

[Simon]

What manufacturers should I stay away from when ordering from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, or any other big house distributor?

I know that ordering on eBay is a big NoNo from experience when purchasing electronic components. Especially IC chips, as most are fake or from bad stock, bad meaning the manufacture knows that a certain percentage is bad but sells the reel off cheap, and others sell on eBay.

Gee thanks, I can't possibly think how it is that I have many repeat customers. Seriously your saying that perhaps some of the major distributors that are still in business for a reason are so bad no one should use them ? where do you live ? under a rock.

There are various reasons to use any of the distribution methods you list. Some are cheaper, some require larger or smaller minimum orders and some just have better webistes. I regularly use Farnell for myself (yes that includes my ebay shop) and work, but recently had to tell the farnell rep that I was going to use digikey for a particular order because i had particular temperature requirements and most of farnell's parametric search's don't have temperature as an option. I had to point out that granted farnell were cheaper but given the time it would take me to hand sort through the specs myself and double check all specs as farnell are notorious for errors in their listings (worse than most ebay sellers in-fact) it would take so much of my time that my employer is paying for that in the long run it's much much cheaper for a £100 order to go and buy the parts from digikey where their search features are better and their listings are very accurate even if their parts are more expensive. As it happens when i did report an error (and it was an elusive one) to digikey I got a response in 2 hours, with farnell it takes 2 weeks to get an automated acknowledgement response, but do I still use farnell ? hell yes as they tend to be cheaper and have more stock than RS but then RS often have stuff that farnell don't so yea not true answer.

[kxenos]

but not Kemet or Multicomp or any of that crap

Kemet is a well-known reputable manufacturer.

[Simon]

What manufacturers should I stay away from when ordering from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, or any other big house distributor?

I know that ordering on eBay is a big NoNo

Manufacturers and distributors are two entirely different things also!

[mikeselectricstuff]

I've heard  the rule to avoid the three M. Microchip, Maxim and Micrel, all known for bad availability apparently.

I personally don't have that much experience except that I DID get burned by a Microchip step-down converter chip that has had pretty bad availability almost constantly.

For electrolytic caps I usually use Panasonic, Nichicon, Rubycon or Chemicon (but not Kemet or Multicomp or any of that crap).

You are joking right?
Maxim,    yes, Micrel , don't  know, but Microchip have always had the  best availablilty in the industry.

[Falcon69]

Yes,I am talking about actual manufacturers, NOT the distributors.

And in regards to eBay.  I ordered some IC chips, 80% of the reel was Junk.  I, myself, will NEVER order IC chips again from eBay, Unless it's an old 1970's chip to repair a tv or something I couldn't find anywhere else, even after spending 5 hours searching.

Dago, why do you say stay away from Kemet?  That's the reason for this post, your opinion, AND reason why?  Are their parts not accurate? Bad quality? D grade compared to another manufacturers A grade or B? (letters on a scale like a math homework or test in school).

[Simon]

And in regards to eBay.  I ordered some IC chips, 80% of the reel was Junk.  I, myself, will NEVER order IC chips again from eBay, Unless it's an old 1970's chip to repair a tv or something I couldn't find anywhere else, even after spending 5 hours searching.

Depends on what you ordered and what you paid for them, there are chips i will not buy from chinese suppliers for that reason and use mouser/farnell but essentially you get what you pay for. For example i have just started selling ICL8038, these are obsolete and used to cost around £20 when they were "clever stuff" but now they are sold by many manufacturers as copies for much less because the original manufacturer stopped making them and same with a similar maxim chip.

[abaxas]

I don't get your issues with ebay.

Loads of great sellers but also plenty of crap ones too. Just avoid the 'we sell everything' type of wholesalers and you'll have a much better experience. Especially true with static sensitive devices.

Ie if they sell electronics, car parts, hair extensions and 99p ipad cables. AVOID!

[coppice]

but not Kemet or Multicomp or any of that crap

Kemet is a well-known reputable manufacturer.

I wondered how that got in the list. If Kemet aren't good enough for you, you'll have to give up electronics. 

[ovnr]

Manufacturers and distributors are two entirely different things also!

Um, Simon... he said "What MANUFACTURERS should I avoid when using these distributors". Not "What distributors should I avoid".


The rest: Microchip has excellent availability, I've never had an issue with Micrel parts, but Maxim is of course the joke of the industry.
Kemet makes perfectly decent caps.

Samsung MLCCs work fine and are wonderfully cheap, but they feel... wrong. The wrong surface texture - most MLCCs have a glossy coating, these are as coarse as cheap bathroom tiles. Not using them for anything remotely hi-rel.

Personally: I've started avoiding European manufacturers of chips & such, because in my experience they tend to fuck up their datasheets on a regular basis (omissions, errors, completely bananas terms for some things, bad German translations, etc).

[Simon]

I don't get your issues with ebay.

Loads of great sellers but also plenty of crap ones too. Just avoid the 'we sell everything' type of wholesalers and you'll have a much better experience. Especially true with static sensitive devices.

Ie if they sell electronics, car parts, hair extensions and 99p ipad cables. AVOID!

There are many that just dropship parts from farnell and have thousands of items for sale that they don't actually stock, this shows in their extortionate prices and feedback for late deliveries or non deliveries with refunds. Some do just try and import anything and everything they think will sell with no regard for quality. Personally I build my stock up gradually, I have just completed stocking with the full E12 range of resistor values from 1R to 10M in 1% and originally started with a small selection of jellybean mosfets that I still sell. Next i will work on building up my capacitor stock hopefully financed by the christmas rush. It takes a lot of work to be a goo seller and while I have my own website people still prefer to buy from me on ebay in 99.999% of cases, what people do find when they buy from me is that I know about the parts I'm selling if they have a question and i am always happy to advise broadly speaking on suitability for use which sometimes has ended me up teaching a customer how to use the part. I had a uni student telling me he couldn't get one of my IRL540's to work with his MCU and that the load was constantly on, so i asked him for a diagram and he had connected it up all wrong and the internal diode was passing current to the load all of the time, I sent him a diagram of how to connect it correctly and he went away a very happy chappy.

On another occasion i custom programmed an ATMega328 for a disabled gentleman who was a bit confused about what he wanted as he was planning to run a CNC machine which was his hobby and passion when he felt well enough from an arduino uno board with a "special version of the bootloader". What I actually found out when he told me the name of the system was that someone had devised a CNC control system using an arduino UNO board simply because the hardware made sense but the firmware was something totally different. I was happy to sort it out for him and ended up supplying the complete kit of MCU, clocking gear, bypass caps and regulator for no more than I sell them on ebay despite the research and time i had to put into sorting out the firmware for him.

Some of us don't mind going the extra mile and somehow I'm often the one they contact when they want something a bit different or advice but that might be because i don't have a flashy shop front but from my listings it's generally clear that I know what i'm selling and I'm genuinely happy to help.

[Simon]

Manufacturers and distributors are two entirely different things also!

Um, Simon... he said "What MANUFACTURERS should I avoid when using these distributors". Not "What distributors should I avoid".

Um yes your correct. Same answer, you get what you pay for, distributors stock everything, including the good, the bad and the ugly, if you buy the cheapest they have to offer don't complain later.

[bookaboo]

Finder Relays.

I remember doing a project for a large machinery OEM, the prototypes used OKO brand relays which I believe are Anglia components own brand, made in China. One of the OEM engineers questioned the reliability of the OKO relay based on the fact that it was Chinese and asked me to use Finder as these were used in their control panels.
Not wanting to rock the boat I specified the more expensive Finder (despite never having a single issue with OKO myself). Barely 1 week after production began I got a phone call about an intermittent fault on a machine, sure enough a simple "tap tap" on the relay and the machine starts, similar problems cropped up throughout that batch.

In that case they were just unreliable due to the vibration from the engine. I saw an even bigger disaster when a certain German crane manufacturer decided to solder 14 pin Finder relays into their fancy new control board, the contacts were rubbish and were a constant source of problems.

[Tandy]

I think it is fair to say that buying on eBay is highly variable, you have every sort of seller on there from poor kids collecting bins of dropped parts from a local factory through to respectable companies that only deal in brand new components that are fully traceable. So you can't really think of eBay as a single source it is thousands of individual sellers all of whom have to get their components either directly or indirectly from manufacturers.

Where you buy your components from is all about what is important to you.

For example if you are a hobbyist/maker who has plenty of time but very little money then buying a bag of 500 resistors that are more like 20% tolerance than the advertised 2% instead of having to buy 5000 from a big distributor is more than likely going to be fine. Component quality is not exactly top priority in a DIY greenhouse watering project. A majority of the components you get will work and because they are cheap you will sometimes get some that end up being duds.

Similarly buying from a Chinese supplier that takes 6 weeks to arrive and may not have the same component next month when you want more is no big deal if you are just stocking up on common components for use at some future time where there are no deadlines. However if you need something for a weekend project then the convenience of having items held in stock in your local country does mean it costs more.

If you are building something to sell then you need to be sure that components are genuine and comply with relevant regulations such as RoHS, if you are building on a small scale you can probably easily substitute components if your supply dries up. If however you are producing a complex item on a large scale like a mobile phone you will need to guarantee that the exact components have good availability and are fully traceable with batch numbers etc from the manufacturer so if a fault is reported in your product you can identify a bad batch of components from a supplier as being the cause.

Putting aside the fake components and re-cyled sold as new that you can only avoid by buying from trustworthy sources, how do you choose manufacturer?

Again this depends on your priorities, lots of small projects are often based on atmel microcontrollers because they are widely available in small quantities and somewhat friendly towards the small guy, making technical information available etc. Contrast that to broadcom that unless you have a regular requirement for thousands or millions they won't even talk to you. But if you are a large scale manufacturer you can get some highly specialised components from them at low prices.

A distributor who cares about their reputation is not going to sell products that are either poor quality or consistently fail to meet the published specifications.

The problem is when you go to a large scale distributor like digikey or RS you have a vast choice. If you search for a 100? resistor and are confronted with 2000 choices from 100 manufacturers you are going to be overwhelmed. For a hobbyist it is a nightmare knowing why you should choose one over another but to be honest it is not really that important for a small producer. A resistor from Samsung is essentially the same as one from ROHM. There will be subtle differences in the materials used etc that an engineer gets used to and those things are reflected in their designs. In a large scale operation a designer may choose a manufacturer because for example in their experience the tolerance of a samsung capacitor is typically -20% and rarely +20% so they take this into account in their design. Perhaps they find they have less failures with ROHM resistors when using wave soldering or due to the different quality tape they are supplied on they have less placement errors on their particular machine. Very little of this is of interest to the small scale producer or hobbyist but you may over time gain a preference for a particular manufacturers product.

So I would suggest the bottom line is concentrate on the published specs rather than the manufacturer at first to choose the part that is the closest match to your requirements within your price range. Don't worry about who the manufacturer is unless you have a bad experience with a particular manufacturer and buy from a supplier you trust.

[Falcon69]

Don't want this thread to turn into a bad rant type thread on eBay or whatever.  I simply would like to educate myself and others of what manufacturers of electronic components (capacitors, resistors, micro-processors, whatever) are good or bad based on their quality, longevity, service, availability, and of course, percentage of failure rates, whether you buy a full reel or just a few. 

For example: Personally, I've had fairly good luck with TI and Fairchild.  I think out of a few hundred chips, I've only gotten a couple that have been unusable.  But, then again, maybe that's why Mouser always gives me a few extra.

bookaboo...pure example why expensive, is not necessarily best.

[Tandy]

But, then again, maybe that's why Mouser always gives me a few extra.

Actually that is because they can't physically count all the tiny components so typically they are weighed to get the quantity. As the weight is not accurate they will make sure the pack is overweight to avoid complaints from customers fro shortages.

[Simon]

Essentially it's about the bottom line. if you buy a chip like an opamp that is available from multiple manufacturers and you get the rock bottom price one chances are there was a compromise. My supplier and yes I tend to stick to one chinese supplier, he is a bit dearer than some but i trust him more and he makes a point of telling me the manufacturer when i ask for a quote, so he too understands the value of one manufactuer versus another. It depends on the use you want to make of the part, some parts of lesser quality may work just fine if you don't push them to limits, but if you know you need to be certain of being able to work up to the limits then get the slightly more expensive one. I tend to look at datasheets as a guide to quality, if the datasheet is brief and cryptic or includes too many parts on the one datasheet I tend to give them less credit.

At work where as many know I'm given stupid specs I have to drill all the way down through the datasheet to check that the part will work as i expect and what it's characteristics are over temperature, example i recently built a discrete SMPS because I could not easily get a SMPS controller rated down to -50C, but i found a nice voltage ref that would go down to -55 with just a 5mV variation over the whole temperature range and the amount of detail on the datasheet and further information available convinced me that the part and therefore it's manufacturer whose name I don't remember and don't care to was reliable. So if you show me a 2 page datasheet with vague specs, I'll not be trusting you as a manufacturer of that part, because extensive specs mean extensive tests and more likelyhood that problems where avoided due to tests

Bare in mind that people like mouser will weigh large quantities of loose parts and if you get more it might be because of this and they err on the side of caution, I also weigh any amount over 20, with my crappy ebay supplied "precicion scales" and no complaints so far

[Jeroen3]

Don't use multicomp for productionsince they sell leftovers from (to you) unknown sources.
Don't use Block pcb transformers, they tend to heat up quite badly.

[hans]

Just never delve into the store brands for anything that needs to be in production on mid to long term. You may have based your design around this wonderfully cheap 0.1% resistor, but find that it's out of stock when you need a reel of them. Because it's a store brand of e.g RS you can't get them somewhere else. The cheapest alternative component may be several times more expensive, making your BOM cost go over the top.

For prototyping I think the store brands can be fine to use.
I don't think I would go on the hunt at Ebay for semiconductors, even for hobby, because of the many stories of scams I've read. You may strike lucky though..

I usually stick to components I can get from 2-3 suppliers (Farnell, RS, Mouser, Digikey) in a day. I've had numerous occasions where a component would be a perfect fit (Maxim springs to my mind for being that component manufacturer) but you can get them only from Mouser and they 34 in stock. Maxim store itself has a multiple week lead time, which pretty much rules it out.

[tggzzz]

I usually stick to components I can get from 2-3 suppliers (Farnell, RS, Mouser, Digikey) in a day. I've had numerous occasions where a component would be a perfect fit (Maxim springs to my mind for being that component manufacturer) but you can get them only from Mouser and they 34 in stock. Maxim store itself has a multiple week lead time, which pretty much rules it out.

That many and such a short time? I've never seen the MAX9979 available except buried in an evaluation board!

[Zero999]

Don't use multicomp for productionsince they sell leftovers from (to you) unknown sources.

Isn't multicomp Farnel's own brand? If it's true, then you can never be sure of the manufacturer.

[tggzzz]

Don't use multicomp for productionsince they sell leftovers from (to you) unknown sources.

Isn't multicomp Farnel's own brand? If it's true, then you can never be sure of the manufacturer.

That can be recursive problem. For example, if you buy an HP laptop it won't have been made by HP. Or consider LED lights, where the LEDs are made by a different company than the one that packages them, or makes the light "bulb", or puts the bulb in the package that you see in the shops. And don't even think of trying to understand what's in Verbatim's (to pick a company at random) CDRs!

[Tandy]

Isn't multicomp Farnel's own brand? If it's true, then you can never be sure of the manufacturer.

Multicomp is farnells brand meaning from multiple sources. I have ordered muticomp diodes before and received some fairchild and some diodes inc. Both were the part I orderd just from two different manufacturers.

[Kjelt]

I've heard  the rule to avoid the three M. Microchip, Maxim and Micrel, all known for bad availability apparently.

You are joking right?
Maxim,    yes, Micrel , don't  know, but Microchip have always had the  best availablilty in the industry.

My personal experience:
For small/medium production/hobbyist Microchip is fine if the chip is already in production (never base a design on preliminary datasheets or samples from them because sometimes they just don't produce the chips).
What I have learnt a few years ago, that for mass production Microchip had big issues.
They have prooven in the past not to be able to deliver huge quantities of some of their processors, then postpone delivery dates over and over again. For a big company this is a no go since everything for production has to be planned and fixed months before.
The nice thing about Microchip is that they keep their stock a long time so you can still order the old chips.