HART Modem Texas Instruments DAC8742H is it suitable for new Design ?

[Dingle]

Hi
My name is Dingle ,works for a small electronics company in Manchester UK. We manufacture scinetific instruments for water industry.

I am thinking of using Texas instruments DAC8742H Hart Modem chip into our existing 4-20ma current loop based on XTR116.
It is meant to do that job, I bought their EVM kit from Farnell and evaluated it and suitable for the purpose.

My question is the availabilty of TI chips through Farnell and RS in UK / Europe market. I don't see much TI chips in Farnell / RS , though many are avilable in Mouser / Digikey. It is the same case with DAC8742H. According to Texas Instruments it is a an active chip and they  do reccomed it for new designs.
Is  Arrow.com being used my PCBmanufacturing/assembly people in UK/ Europe ?, they have facility in London. Arrow is one of the distributors of TI chips in UK. TI being one of the giants and specialised chips comes from them mainly, but why Farnell / RS don't sell their stuff ?

Let me know your expert opinion in this regard..
Thank you
Dingle

[tom66]

You will have little difficulty sourcing TI chips from DigiKey/Mouser/Arrow if you are using a CEM (contract electronics manufacturer) - they will deal with these guys every day.

That said, TI are generally much less friendly to smaller companies than others, and this led a lot of engineers I know to design out their parts as they were too difficult to source during the semiconductor supply crisis.  The situation has massively improved and most TI parts are available now, but there are still a fair number of bitter feelings left. 

TI also don't offer any product support any more directly to SMEs.  You have to hope you can get it via your distributor, but this also often isn't available for SMEs.

[Dingle]

Hi
Thanks for your quick response and appreciate your time.
kind Regards
Dingle

[nctnico]

That said, TI are generally much less friendly to smaller companies than others, and this led a lot of engineers I know to design out their parts as they were too difficult to source during the semiconductor supply crisis.  The situation has massively improved and most TI parts are available now, but there are still a fair number of bitter feelings left. 

Rest assured that TI availability will be non-existent when the next crisis hits. TI does make create parts with good documentation, but part availability is frugal at best.

[tom66]

That said, TI are generally much less friendly to smaller companies than others, and this led a lot of engineers I know to design out their parts as they were too difficult to source during the semiconductor supply crisis.  The situation has massively improved and most TI parts are available now, but there are still a fair number of bitter feelings left. 

Rest assured that TI availability will be non-existent when the next crisis hits. TI does make create parts with good documentation, but part availability is frugal at best.

For sure, we respun several products during the shortage and went for smaller companies where we could maintain direct contact with the factory/design labs and they could work with us on getting smaller quantities of parts on an adhoc basis.  Most TI parts in our designs have been removed now.  TI doesn't care about the small guy -- so I don't care about TI.