Signal source
Datasheet and documentation signals.
A product's datasheet is the most reliable public statement of what the product needs from its components. It is written by the people who built it, it is specific, and it is kept current.
It is also silent on the question a semiconductor vendor cares about most. It says what the product does, not what is inside.
Requirements, stated by the maker.
Interfaces to the outside world, total power, supply range, operating temperature, dimensions, throughput. These are the values a fit check needs, and datasheets state them with units.
In testing, every check that rested on a stated datasheet value came back consistent across runs and across two different kinds of model.
Each product gets the same fixed set of fields. Each value is stored with the text it was taken from. A field the document does not state is recorded as unknown. A field that does not apply to this kind of product is recorded as not applicable.
Five datasheets, none naming the device inside.
Across five industrial products, a camera module, a machine vision camera, a time-of-flight camera, a motor controller and a lidar, no datasheet named the processor or programmable device. Four did not state the interface between sensor and processor. None stated the memory type.
A product judged from its datasheet alone can be excluded with confidence when a stated requirement rules the part out. It can rarely be confirmed, because the fields that would confirm it are not there.
Two faults that came from reading, not from the document.
Both were found in our own extraction during testing.
An operating range of minus 10 to plus 50 degrees was labelled with a temperature grade, and the grade did not match the part's list. The check failed on a product the part covers comfortably. Temperature is now compared as a numeric range.
A company news page stored as evidence for one product supplied interfaces and a temperature range that belonged to other products. Evidence now carries a scope, and company-level pages cannot fill product fields.
What a datasheet is good for.
- Excluding products a stated requirement rules out
- Establishing the requirements a part must meet
- Showing which fields need a second source
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