 every single week we do the great search with digikey where in the world is that part that I need on the digikey lady you know we're gonna find out okay so let's go back to my computer right so we're gonna try to reduce the quiescent current of my circuit it's drawing 250 microamps in sleep mode I want to reduce that more but I'm stuck right now because my regulator the AP 2112 it's a lovely regulator but the quiescent current is 80 microamps oh it's low but it could be lower right maybe we get to like 10 or less that can make a big difference you know if I can reduce the quiescent current by a third or quarter it means it wants her that much longer in sleep mode right good good things and I'm interested in that now so let's see if we can find it a you know I'm gonna find a perfect duplicate minus that quiescent current for the same price right obviously if it existed when picked it but let's see what we can do to find something close and ideally drop and replaceable because then I don't have to respin my board design although like I'm willing to do that but it would be cool if I could just like swap in you know a different regulator and just you know maybe it's a little bit more expensive maybe the dropouts a little higher but the quiescent is much better and so it's great for low power usage so let's check it out okay it's going to digikey and I'm going to just search for you know voltage regulator to start I like to start nice and vague and this is by the way the AP 2112 and you know one thing you could do is you could go through and you could click some of these things to get a similar chip but I actually want to be a little bit more freeform in my search again there's like so many different regulators like power supply you know powers and power supplies is a huge part of engineering but we just want the linear regulators now one day in the future maybe I'll upgrade my design to use a buck converter you know there's very low quiescent buck converters but I'm gonna stick to the LDL it it's small it's effective my dropout is you know very minimal it's not like I have like 16 volts going down to three volts I'm going from like 3.7 to 3.3 so I want I want you know like at 200 milliamps or so I want to like not have a dropout of higher than 400 milliamps that millivolts if possible okay so start out with of course I only want the active and normally stopping stocking items so let's let's do that and you can cut down the quantities quite a bit I'm going to you know there's outputs you can have adjustable ones where like you have like a twisty like not twisting out but a resistor divider in this case I don't know sometimes there's like adjustable and they can also be fixed but I basically just want these I don't want programmable I don't want adjustable I want it to just like spit out 3.3 volts I'm like I'm not interested in anything else I also only want one regulator and I want I don't think I need to worry about this because the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick that voltage output so there's for adjustables you know you'll want the minimum and maximum but if you only want a fixed output you just go to the you only want the output voltage min fixed I'm gonna scroll down until I get to 3.3 a couple different options so looks like there's like a couple like there's sometimes variations and stuff but these are good apply okay it's thinking great okay next up I want current output so you know I need it to be somewhat close to what I've got now the current regulator I've got the 600 milliamp output 600 milliamp is like quite a bit you know I can live with as little as 500 but I don't want to go below 500 right so let's pick 500 and then I mean we'll go up to like seven and a half amp but I know that there's no seven and a half amp one in the package I'm gonna use but whatever just you just select it and then we'll get rid of those later okay now we're up to the important part which is the quiescent right so the one we have now is like up to 80 max I think I'm going to stay and you know because it goes high quite fast like if you're not looking at the quiescent current like believe me get regulators with you know like it says here like up to 20 milliamps quiescent and the quiescent current is the current that it draws even when no other current is being used like that's the the current of the regulator itself not the output it's like what it itself draws from the power supply so I definitely want it to be less than 80 actually kind of want to be less than like 50 I'm gonna say like 25 or less and it looks like you can go down to one micro amp and you can see like when you're picky about when you're when you're picky about the quiescent current you know it tells you how many are remaining it like drops really fast so let's let's see let's see what we got here okay so there's a couple options and normally I would you know sort by price but here's a thing so I kind of want one that is the same like size and best off you know if possible the same package so the first thing we do is there's not that many of these I'm actually gonna try to get rid of some of the ones that are like the SOT 89 which is like a larger package size I'm not gonna be able to fit that on my board and like especially not this this is like a TO 263 if it's a TO anything there's like no way I'm gonna fit that on the board so let's get rid of like the very chunky boards so all of these TO's sorry you got to go and I'm also gonna get rid of the six SOIC and I'm also gonna get rid of the SOT 89's cuz they're huge but the rest of these might fit right so let's let's apply so now I've got only about 27 okay we're doing better so of these the first thing I can do is well so the price is a little sneaky because again remember that's for the in for individual units and I want to compare this to the AP 2-on-1-2 which has a price of about like you know 10 to 7 cents it's kind of another reason I love the AP 2-on-1-2 it's so cheap does such a good job and it's so inexpensive so I want something comparable in price and you can't search by price range but that would be really cool did you get it so maybe they'll maybe they'll be inspired it'd be cool to say like for that quantity here's how much I'm willing to pay but what we'll do instead is we'll go to the view prices at and we'll just put in like five thousand because I don't really care about the price individual right if one is 60 cents and one's a dollar but when you get to the real quantity up to real quantity they're both basically six cents or seven cents it doesn't it's not gonna make a big difference okay so now we're here well here's a deal I definitely don't want to be GA I just you know I'm judgy so let's get rid of the BGAs so let's let's see all of these and then subtract the BGA just get that right out okay cool alright so now we're actually looking at you know the pricing and the pricing is actually not too bad like you know the AP 2-on-1-2 is like 10 cents so I'm gonna pay more but I'm not gonna pay like super crazy amounts right it's not like I mean it does get high it gets up to a dollar but oh and there's the Rochester which we can remove as well so let's let's not include marketplace because I don't want the Rochester which are there they sell parts that are discontinued you can still get them okay and then so here's kind of something interesting so it looks like regulators are starting to come in this package which I've never used but I'm actually I kind of think it's adorable it's got like big distances between the pads but it's physically quite small so this is interesting to me so even though I may not use it in this particular situation because I already have the board spun out like and done I don't want to change it I do find I do find this package intriguing okay so we've got a couple options here there's two sought 23 fives and some DFNs and some more sought 23 fives looks like there's a bunch of sought 23 fives and that's the package I'm replacing so let's just select that wait I also want sorry I would like to teesot yeah let's see okay so that could give me the thin ones the thick ones okay so this is it these are my options which is like really nice I've actually paired it down to like you know a screen full there's only six options and the next thing you can do is again you can't sort by price but there's a couple options here by price then you can go all the way to the right and you can look at the things that might be most important for you so for example there is ones with like eight microamps and point seven volt drop out this one might have a slightly lower dropout also 600 milliamps this one's only one microamp and has one amp output which is like really impressive so that's the but the pricing gets a little higher like we're paying 35 cents so I'm actually you know the one I actually think I like the most of this four microamps 600 milliamp output and about 0.5 volt at 600 milliamp dropout because I don't need this high voltage range but I like that it's only four microamps like I think that's gonna make a big difference in this situation so I'm gonna pick up some of these RT 90 80s and here's a tip if you're ever using these regulators so blessedly unlike many other devices including transistors pretty much every company that makes regulators in the SOP 23-5 package which is very common size they all use the same pinout so you can verify here it goes V in ground enable and then you know connect and V out and the same thing here V in ground enable no connect and V out so this can just pop right in just make sure that you have like the right you know get voltage range capacitance whatever things it needs but I can't she just try this on the board so maybe next week by time I get the chips swap it in see the quiescent current hopefully it should drop by like at least 60 microamps so that will be a very nice improvement in my design all right and that's a great search what did you do this week regulator found