Question of the Month: When you're choosing components for a new project, what influences your selection the most?

This is a tricky question! Very hard to pick one from the given 5. It's definitely a combination of everything. 

I will definitely look for components from a reputed manufacturer most of them will maintain an good documentation. But if it's a hard to source part then I will look for alternatives.

It also depends on the following items

• What type of component?
• Type of project.
• Deadlines to meet.
• End customer requirement.

cstanton said:

Can you share an example where a specific factor—like availability or documentation—completely changed what component you ended up using?

ESD components, for say Ethernet IO, and TVSdiodes for general IO can be tricky to get right. In these cases documentation is key.

I'd go with [availability, price] as equally important, then [documentation, reputation]. In recent years, I've been more willing to take risks in design, since some things can only meet their commercially-viable price points if we take some level of creativity and risk by going away from more renowned manufacturers and into the darker depths of basing designs on more fragmented, incomplete documentation and reverse-engineered designs.

A component's availability in stock is very important.  Whether it's stocked at a specific distributor is less important as long as its stock is well represented across the common distributors.  There is nothing worse than a product being held up by one or two hard to get components.

I voted:

Detailed datasheets and documentation

but only because it gets to veto any other consideration - if the part won't work or won't fit then it's no use.

After that, it depends - for a quick test jig or proof of concept (both of which I do quite a lot) then availability quickly is often the primary consideration.

For a job where I expect to make and deliver a few working prototypes then Availability from your preferred distributor is important.

Manufacturer reputation is often a consideration, and more so when the design will eventually be built in large numbers.

The significance of Eval boards and reference designs depends a great deal on the type of part and how different it is from similar parts that I may have used before. 

MK

Fortunately people can express themselves in the comments 

True, but with if weighted averages are used to tally up the votes, you'll likely get a clearer picture as to what the community values more highly.

Ah but even if you rank them, one will be at the top, right?

We should be allowed to rank these rather than just being allowed select just one option, as all apply to varying degrees.

Hard to know which order to rank, to decide which one to vote for, but I wanted to touch on the "community recommendation and reviews" - more often than not, the products that are reviewed, or the manufacturer blogs regarding new products, have been extremely useful. New components have new features which I often only initially learn from blogs or reviews. For instance, I'm having an interesting time trying to develop a gesture-controlled switch using a part that a manufacturer blogged about on element14. And I strongly considered Infineon parts for a load switch based on a blog of theirs (and I did order some of their parts, but I've not narrowed it down yet, since I'm also looking at NXP).