Samtec and SnapEDA Team Up to Speed Design Process

By Pradeep Chakraborty

Samtec is releasing new digital models for over 100,000 of its products on SnapEDA, a popular circuit board design library. Traditionally, designers have spent days creating digital models – such as symbols and footprints – for each component in their respective designs.

With this Samtec-SnapEDA collaboration, designers can now easily discover, download, and design with over 100,000 ready-to-use Samtec connector models, helping accelerate the design process. The new models include USB, card edge, board-to-board, headers, and RF coaxial connectors.

Elizabeth Bustamante, CAD Manager, SnapEDA, spoke from San Francisco, USA, on why Samtec chose to go with SnapEDA. She said: “We’re thrilled to work with Samtec because they are one of the most in-demand connector manufacturers on SnapEDA. Our users will benefit greatly from these new PCB libraries that will save them days of time, and allow them to quickly design-in Samtec parts.

“Samtec chose SnapEDA because over half a million engineers use SnapEDA each year to select and design-in parts into their designs. With our massive community of hardware designers, and their high-quality components that are high in demand with our community, it was the perfect match.”

Competing against existing models
How will Samtec compete against other such existing models? She added: “It’s not so much that Samtec is competing to get their models into a design, but rather, their physical products. The digital model (or, what are in fact, manufacturing files), are really when they design-in comes to fruition.

“Samtec has high-quality and reliable products, and an incredible focus on service and support. I think, that’s why so many engineers trust their products. Ultimately, engineers will make the decision based on which specs are right for them, and the model is really the ‘icing on the cake’, after they’ve made that selection decision as a reward to help them design it in more easily.”

Samtec has over 100,000 new models on SnapEDA. The new models include USB, card edge, board-to-board, headers, and RF coaxial connectors, because the new models include USB, card edge, board-to-board, headers, and RF coaxial connectors. Since Samtec focuses on connectivity solutions, that’s where the focus was for this project. However, SnapEDA has millions of models for all kinds of products.

Boosting electronics designers’ productivity
How can electronics designers boost their productivity with free symbols and footprints for Samtec products? Elizabeth Bustamante said: “Finding high-quality models for the exact part number, in the exact format and version you need is actually quite difficult. With these models, Samtec’s Signal Integrity Team is working directly with defining every element.

“Additionally, SnapEDA’s translation technology ensures that it is available in every format. The commitment to quality, and the breadth of our database and design formats supported is why we’re the #1 parts library on the web in terms of traffic.

“On top of this, creating connector models (which these are) are especially time-consuming, due to their non-standard shapes, pitches, pads, and cutouts regions. Having these models available to download, designers can spend more time in improving their design, allowing them to focus on optimization and innovation.”

Finally, how are newer, unreleased digital models going to be handled? She said: “We have a popular service, called InstaPart, which allows the engineers to request any models in 24 hours, and fulfilled by SnapEDA’s in-house component engineering team. Furthermore, the SnapEDA and Samtec teams are working closely to deploy new models to the SnapEDA platform as they become available.”