 The Great Search, where every single week Lady Aida uses her powers of engineering to help you find things you need on digikey.com, we're going to make a lot of a part shortage so this particular segment that we do each week on the desk of Lady Aida is even more useful. Lady Aida, what is the Great Search this week? Okay, this week's Great Search is actually a continuation of last week's Great Search because when you're out of a part, you'll do anything to get an alternative. So we're not like a super shortage, we're having a little bit of a shortage for the AP 2-on-1-2, which is our go-to regulator. We love the 3.3 volt regulator, it has 600 milliamps out. It's got a very low drop out, it's stable with ceramic capacitors, it's just an all-around great little regulator and we use it in so many of our boards, like almost every board and feather uses it. It's also very inexpensive, it's about 10 cents in quantity and so we have a bunch on order and we're going to get some more, but while we're waiting for some to come in, I want to be able to stretch out that supply and also I'm thinking like, I take advice from Mr. Lady Aida and Mr. Lady Aida, I used to say, never let a crisis go to waste. Now we say let every third crisis go to waste, but try to not let two out of three crises go to waste. Yeah, when five crises come up, it's okay to say never let a crisis go to waste but maybe a fifth one, that one can kind of go to waste. It's on us. It's not a yogurt hardware, if you get five crisis stamps you get a free crisis. It's okay. So seeing that there's other parts we've had to find alternatives for like MOSFETs and crystals, those are much easier to replace, but a regulator, what's interesting about that is because we have this kind of favorite regulator and it's using so many things. Not being able to get it is more of a supply shock than just not being able to get a microcontroller. If we can't get a microcontroller, which we can't, only those boards that use that chip go out, but if you have something that literally 70% of your boards are using, you can't get it, it's a little bit more stressful. And so last week what we did is we did a great search where I showed how to find an alternative for a lot of our breakout boards that don't need as high current. They can get away with 150 milliamp regulator. I still want that ultra low dropout. Of course I want it to be pin compatible, not require bypass cap, fairly low quiescent current, fairly low noise and we found a couple of good alternatives. This week I want to future proof myself. I want to say look, we found alternative for the breakout boards, for the feathers and the dev boards, we still want to have a high current output regulator. So let's quickly go to the overhead and I'll just show what I mean. Since this is the QDPot ESP32, this has an ESP32 dual core 240 megahertz microcontroller with Wi-Fi, it uses a lot of current. When you turn that Wi-Fi on and start blasting or connecting to the SSID, the power ramps up and you can easily use 300 milliamps and so I definitely can't use 150 milliamp regulator. It wants something that is stable and good for 500, 600 milliamps. That's ideal because you can also power your peripherals from the same LDO. And so you'll see here, this is the LDO, I'm using the AP2112K, again I love it. Another alternative that is drop-in replaceable for that same current is the RT9080. We covered that in a previous great search when I showed looking for a much lower quiescent current. Only thing is that that regulator is also impossible to get and both of these have pretty intense lead time. So let's go to Digikey, let's go see what we can find. This is the part, again I can't get lead time stretching out into 80 weeks. I feel like I'm a weather lady now and I'm stretching out into the weekend and it's going to be hot. It's going to be 80 weeks of lead time. But what I do like about this is again it's got that high current output. So before what we did is we focused on pin compatibility. Let's find something that has the same SOT23 or TSOT235. This time I'm going to look for a fixed regulator that's about the same size or maybe smaller. Maybe I can make a version of my PCBs going forward that can use two different packages because that flip-flop design can really save you when you can use two alternatives. So we're still going to go with the surface mount parts. I definitely need to have an enable feature but the problem is sometimes the features have more stuff. So I'm actually going to leave that unchecked. I'm just going to look for something around 0.4V at the max 600mA dropout. Current output is 600mA but I can go higher so I'm not going to check that either. And then I'm going to check I do want one fixed positive 3.3V output and I want it to be active. So we've got a couple of similar parts. You'll see there are a lot of SOT23 looking things but there are also some weird SMT parts. Also of course since I didn't filter by package I'm getting SOT223s. So now let's look at what's really important to me which is the current output. Again, I need something that's like at least 500mA. I'll go up to like an amp. I think anything more than that's going to be a pretty big package. It's not going to be something really tiny so I'm going to apply that. Let's look at quiescent current. I definitely want something that has like 100mA or less because the AP2112 is about like 80mA. It's actually a little bit less maybe 40mA and I definitely don't want high quiescent current so I'll apply that. Alright now we're doing pretty good. So let's look at what we've got as some options. So I do care about pricing. I can't really afford to put a dollar regulator on every feather if I'm going to sell the feather for about $10 retail. So let's put in the view price at $10k pieces. Okay now we've got some good options. So first up there is this pin compatible runic regulator. There's also this one which actually looks pretty nice but it's not in stock. There's some other packages. There's this 6DFN which might fit but what I really like to look of is after I got past the SOP223s is a couple of on semi-NCP parts. These are really tiny. These are 1mm by 1mm SMT but they do come in a couple different configurations and they have ones. There's a few BGAs. I'm going to skip those. It looks like other companies are also using that same triangular DFN style. So what I'm going to do is, oh first I'm going to look at maybe dropout and maybe filter on that. So let's look. So max dropout remember the previous AP2112 had a dropout of about .4 volts over 600 milliamps. I don't want anything much higher than that. So let's filter for about half a volt. I think that's still quite high but better than nothing. And then voltage input max is fine 5 volts. So yeah I think we've got a couple good options here. The B33s I really liked. Oh wait, hold on, I lost my NCPs. The NCPs are, oh interesting I didn't select the right dropout max, huh, okay, not sure what I did. But I did like the look of these NCPs. I'll say that one thing, once I saw this little DFN package I was interested in it. And when I looked at the datasheet there's one thing to watch out for. There's an A series and a B series and the A, so you have to be careful. A regulator is a regulator until it's like it does something funky. This regulator has an option if you look here there's a, when you disable it it doesn't just float the output, it actually pulls the output low, which I don't want. Like I don't, sometimes I have like a feather that is disabled but you can still provide like an external 3.3 volt somehow. I don't have a pulled down 3.3 volt and I don't really like that in the regulator although I can see why somebody would want it in some cases. So you do want to make sure you get the B type for this. So when I looked through these I saw that there was the NCV8177B and then the NCP176 also available in the 6DFN. And then I think I also looked at what was actually in stock right now which is like very few things. Let's see if I can find the part again. No, oh you know what because I bought them. But I was like I have to buy them before the show. So I ended up looking at the NCP167 and B which came in at BGA and DFN. And the reason I liked this one is it's, first off they had some stock which I purchased. I left some in. It's 700 milliamps output and very very low dropout only a third of a volt at 700 milliamps. And again it's got this very tiny XDFN shape. And it seemed like NCP that on-semi this NCP series they had a lot of different alternatives. You know the 6DFN version that I showed like there was also a 6DFN version it doesn't fit within a SOP235 like you can't have both share the same package. But I did find that you know I downloaded from DigiKey they have a service where you can get like the CAD model. So I went here and I downloaded the footprint directly and imported it into Eagle and then I just tweaked a little bit to pass my DRC and then you can see here this part here I haven't situated within the SOP235 and so you know for my next board that I run I'm going you know because it's like it's so tiny it is small it does fit into a 6x6 rule. If you need 7x7 or 8x8 it's going to be tougher I mean this is a very small part I'll show it on the overhead as well. But because it does fit inside that package what I might do is the next few boards I run is have this sort of flip-flop design where you can use either or it doesn't take up any more space and then you can see you know the pads you have to kind of route them like it's not the order of the pins is not exactly the same so you have to kind of like the V and pin kind of has to go around a little bit. But I think I can have a you know a PCB that has either and have the stencil have either and then you know whichever I can get if I can't get the SOP23 I can go with the DFN or vice versa because they seem like they're very equivalent regulators. So let me show this on the overhead. So I did pick up some of these the NCP167B and let me see I mean these are so small I just got this package today so we're gonna look I don't see I already lost a bunch okay so these it's like they're really tiny I mean you definitely can't hand solder them yeah I mean you can barely see it but it it does have a little triangular center ground pad and it has a little I mean like yeah you can't really see it but it's shining on the tip of my finger it does have the four pads again it's a little bit of a scary small package but it seems to be quite popular it'll fit inside the package of the I mean I prefer the SOP235 but I think the next prototype I make I'm gonna try to have this as an alternative and you know if this it's a little bit more expensive but I will say if I'm making you know a QV pie this is a lot smaller I could save some space it's only like you know 25 cents instead of 10 cents it's a lot smaller and maybe I can fit you know an extra if I need a couple extra traces on the top this will give me some clearance so I'm gonna try this you know as an alternative I think even though I don't need to use it yet knowing that this part shortage is only gonna extend I'm a little bit more wary now of having this dependence on a part where if I can't get any it's like I can't really manufacture anything so thankfully you know I'm finding ways around it but do yourself a favor because I think this part shortage is gonna be another year and a half or two years so you'll thank yourself later for adding multiple package options to your design today it's gonna be a long winter spring summer it's ground on day in far shortage land all right that's the research all right thanks everybody