How to find the best component for your BOM with Arena PartsList

This week, we are reviewing Arena PartsList and sharing a variety of ways it makes circuit design, prototyping and BOM building easy. Today, we are discussing how PartsList can be used to pull availability and cost information for components in your BOM.

If you’ve ever designed unavailable or single source parts into your circuit board, you can appreciate the importance of easy access to component information like cost and availability. The last thing you need is to rework your entire BOM due to unexpectedly long lead times for a critical component.

Fortunately, if you’re designing your BOM in Arena PartsList, it’s easy to keep close tabs on lead times. With PartsList, you can access real-time availability and cost information for parts in your BOM with a single click.

PartsList works with Octopart, a Google-esque search engine for electronic components, to provide you with all the information you need to quickly determine the right component to use and the best distributor to source from.

When your BOM lives in PartsList, you can easily gather and save part information directly from Octopart. Using the Autofill functionality, PartsList finds a link to the Octopart detail page for each part in your BOM and places that link directly in the corresponding PartsList row. To check part availability, simply click on the link to the Octopart detail page and check out the distributor table.

By referencing Octopart, you can find common distributors and up-to-date cost and in-stock inventory information. No more searching the web and retracing your steps to get the latest data!