Recently my colleague, Geof Lipman, recently published an article on All About Circuits discussing the issues that currently exist with free ECAD models. Whether it’s generic symbols or wrong footprints, the quality of free models is undoubtedly questionable. Our ECAD team at Octopart Toronto has developed innovative solutions for these problems that I'd like to share with a wider audience.

Model Creation Process Flow

Octopart's Toronto team (formerly EE Concierge) has built a global team of electrical engineers to produce and verify ECAD models. These team members independently produce models of the same component, which are then compared against each other to ensure that the models are identical. Once a model candidate is selected, our Toronto team uses machine intelligence to verify the accuracy of part data before handing it off for final human approval.

Without giving too much away, here are some more specifics:

Creation and Verification Process

1. Each component creation task is assigned to three different electrical engineers
2. Each engineer creates a “component” (attribute + schematic + footprint)
3. Components are run through a verifier that requires all three components to be identical
4. If they are not identical, an additional engineer creates a component
5. All components are run through the verifier to search for three identical components
6. Steps 4 and 5 are repeated if three identical components are not found
7. Create 3D model
8. If all checks pass, an expert engineer will verify and approve the component (attribute + schematic + footprint + 3D model)

The expert engineers are managers of the global team that oversees the creation and verification process. If you’re interested in learning more about how the components are created, I would recommend checking out our style guide.

Furthermore, we are the exclusive source of these models for Altium (Octopart’s parent company), ensuring that engineers using Altium products can access these models directly without having to import them from third party sites. We’ve been partnering with manufacturers such as TE Connectivity and Texas Instruments to continually develop more models to publish on Octopart and Altium products. Feel free to reach out to business@octopart.com to learn more about additional model creation services.

Final Thoughts

It’s been about a year and half since Octopart rolled out free, high quality models for all users. In the past 6 months, our team has created over 180,000 models, bringing the total to over 460,000 models in our database. Our mission is to provide free and accurate information and resources for engineers to build awesome technology. I’m confident in saying that our team is providing that. As we continue to invest in model creation, we encourage any and all feedback. Please reach out to contact@octopart.com for any questions and/or comments.