Out of the Box and Into the Cloud, for Component Suppliers!

by Mike Donnelly
18 April 2016

You've poured brilliant engineering ideas and tremendous design effort into your products, so they can have valuable features that are useful in broad applications. Yet these are not always well understood by your customers. Your work isn’t finished until the customer "gets it"!

You undoubtedly use powerful tools and processes for the design and manufacture of your components. But can you say the same for your technical marketing methods? Are you relying on static .pdf documents and other low bandwidth communication methods to deliver your message the last mile, to the customer's aha moment?

PartQuest Explore is ready to help. With high-performance modeling and simulation for analog and digital electronic circuits and mechatronic systems, it provides global 24/7 access to interactive (or “Live”) application examples.

If you were a marketer for ACME Semiconductor (a fictitious company!), you could embed a “Live” Application example right in your on-line marketing content, like this:

Since this is a "Live" design, you can move the waveform probes around and look at any other signals in the circuit. You can change various design parameters, such as:

  • The battery voltage
  • The wire gauge and length
  • The resistor value (that sets the LED current level for the AS123)

Just push the "play" button (green arrow) and a new simulation will run and show you the effect of your changes! Note also that the parameter values are restricted to a limited range that can be specified by your AE ... that can help keep your customer out of trouble from misusing your part.

You can provide full application descriptions, along with an invitation for the customer to copy your reference design: He can then use it as a starting point for his own circuit development effort, but with your component already designed-in!

You can also add models of your components to our Partner Library. Your customer can then design those parts into his own original circuits and systems, by simply dragging them onto his schematic and running simulations to verify performance. This helps him find the proper component size for his specific application. You'll gain visibility into how our design community is using your products in their applications. Their forum comments may provide key insight into the emerging needs of the broader market.

Watch this short video to see how one of our partners, Coilcraft, is providing access to their soft-saturation inductor models:

Last but not least, you can directly engage your customers using private projects. These secure, cloud-based workspaces provide true collaboration on your customers’ real designs. Your AEs can help them get the most value from your components, and avoid costly misunderstandings. 

To learn more, check out our new Suppliers page.

Happy Selling!