1 Introduction

As electrification continues to sweep across various industries, manufacturing is more strained to keep up with the rapid demands needed for various products. Many manufacturers have adopted an approach of dual sourcing, where an integrated circuit is not allowed to be used by a designer unless variants are made by multiple vendors, allowing multiple supply chains to be tapped. This creates a more robust sourcing plan for the sustainment of a product, allowing the manufacturer to have backup plans in the presence of long lead times.

Finding multiple variants of a single product is not always simple. Electrical specification can vary from product to product in magnitude such that one can not function at the level the designer requires, even though the device exists in the same package and pinout, and provides the same transfer function. Thermal properties can vary. One variant can be vastly more expensive to the point that while the variant serves as a viable alternative, the variant violates the bill of materials budget to do so. All of these are challenges that the sourcing engineer must make sure are met before the sourcing engineer can declare that two products work as functional replacements of the other.

In the area of Hall effect sensors, one additional area of potential concern is lead frame construction. While some variants use a standard SOIC-16 package, Texas Instruments' TMCS product family uses a fused leadframe approach in SOIC-10, as a singular lead style of frame allows for resistance in the lead frame, optimizing power loss on the input side of the frame. The purpose of this application note is to examine performance and reliability concerns when using these two styles of packages as functional equivalents of one another in a design.