TO-220AB Where art thou?

[zevon8]

RANT (on).... please can somebody just carry good ol' TO-220 case Mosfets? There are multi-month lead times for quantity volumes of many favorites now. Alot of the suppliers are switching completely to SMD-220 and D-pak. I'm sorry this is crap. Many designs require real heatsinking and without contact plates or other crazy mechanical schemes.
RANT (off)

Nevermind the hassle of redoing a dozen or so PCB's, it is just a hassle to use these parts without a big expenditure in tooling. I do production runs of boards that have up to 21 of these parts each, say 30 PCB at a go. It not worth jobbing it out, but its a hassle for me to do. I will need to get an adhesive / paste dispensing system now.

uggh.

 

[Bob Scott]

I checked the Digikey search for TO220AB MOSFETS in stock. There are 322 part numbers covering 13 pages of TO220AB MOSFETS in stock and can be shipped to you overnight. These are just the AB variation of TO-220.

What's the problem?

 

[dknguyen]

Be glad they aren't being replaced with power BGAs!

 

[zevon8]

While I agree, they show many many items as part of their inventory at Digikey, many of the items are either non-stock with 1000 peice minimum order, are currently backordered, or are being phased out once current stock is gone.

From the page with 322 parts,

Digi-Key Part Search


select N channel, and then TO-220AB, you get a page with only 45 items, and only 4 of those are stock.

Sure they stock some, but many are "odd" value ratings, and the common parts, say 50 Vds and 40A, are getting sold out of stock.

 

[Bob Scott]

Digi-Key Part Search


select N channel, and then TO-220AB, you get a page with only 45 items, and only 4 of those are stock.

Ewww. Digikey is dropping TO-220 items from stock in favour of the TO-220F insulated plastic packs which require no electical insulation.

Dropping common parts from stock does not bode well for the financial health of Digi-Key. Perhaps they are headed for bankruptcy like so many electronic wholesalers before them. Failures like Varah's, Cam Gard, W.E.S., Zentronics, Armaco.

Linear parts in TO-3 cases are getting scarce and/or expensive also.

 

[zevon8]

It's all a push in 2 directions: lead free and surface mount. Problem is, pretty hard to get big watts cheap in surface mount. I have had about 30 parts need re-sourcing in the last year. SOme are easy, same part, slight number change, other big-time PITA.

I have a few PCB's that we do some surface mount on, but it is small power, and low volume.

Just for laughs, I tried a re-do with surface mount FET's and stayed at 30% power to allow free-air cooling -- trippled the FET count, and it was over 5 times the PCB area.
Right now I can do two TO220 parts in nearly the same space of a DPAK surface mount, and get way more power out of the to220.

It's not just the distributers though, the plants are producing way less through-hole also.
Pick a non-stock part at the distributer level and then go upstream to the maker.... likely no stock there either.