Octopart’s mission has always been to open up access to part information for design, sourcing, and manufacturing.

That’s why I am excited to announce the upcoming inclusion of CAD models on Octopart.

Our parent company, Altium, has built up a huge database of high-quality schematic symbols, footprints, and 3D models for electronic parts to be used in circuit board design.

However, this content has long been exclusively available to users of Altium Designer.

This spring, we’ll be unleashing those hundreds of thousands of symbols, footprints, and 3D models onto Octopart and making them available to everyone free of charge.

And they won’t just be in Altium Designer format; they’ll also be available in EAGLE, Upverter, and Cadence OrCAD (symbols only) at launch. Down the line, we’ll be working to make them available in even more popular ECAD formats, so let us know what EDA software you use.

Through close collaboration with our sister company, EE Concierge, we will quickly extend coverage of this library to the most popular parts used in electronic design. Octopart users will benefit from the EE Concierge part verification system, which produces trustworthy part models at very low error rates.

While our initial launch of CAD on Octopart may seem humble, our aims are mighty and our vision is long. We’ll be fervently iterating on this functionality, and we will be counting on you to let us know what we need to improve (for now, take our quick CAD survey). Over time, Octopart hopes to save you countless hours on part model design and earn your trust as the primary source for free, verified ECAD symbols, footprints, and 3D models.

Get notified when CAD models arrive on Octopart.

Take our pre-launch survey.