Packages

Packages is a tool to maintain a repository of packages of electronic components. It is developed with the goal that various applications use one and the same repository as a basis for their handling of packages. The repository is in a well-documented JSON format, easy to parse in a variety of programming languages.

Contents

Overview

Many packages for electronic components exist, but it is not as straightforward as having a long list. On occasion a package name refers to a group of packages, and package name on its own is not conclusive about all dimensions of the package. Essentially the same package may also be known under multiple names —this is in part the result of various standardization bodies that each on their own standardize packages, without regard to the other organizations doing the same.

EDA suites (Electronic Design Application) focus on a flattened view of the package: the footprint. For mechanical design, the height of the package is important too, and pick-&-place machines often need to know the shape of the terminals (for example, gull-wing versus lug-lead) to recognize and centre the component on the nozzle. That is to say: these various applications all use package data, but they don’t all need the same data. Packages groups the data in a structured way, and makes it easily searchable (using both keyword search and parametric search).

License

The Packages application including its data set and other resources, hereby collectively referred to as “the software”, is copyright 2021-2022 CompuPhase, and licensed under the Apache License version 2.

The manual and these help pages are copyright 2021-2022 CompuPhase and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The project is maintained at: https://github.com/compuphase/Packages

Quick start

On start-up, Packages opens the repository that was most recently used. In practice, you will probably use a single repository for all your packages, but you can have several repositories and select the one to browse/edit in the “File” menu.

Changes or additions to the repository are saved automatically on switching to a new package or when closing the application. There still is a “Save” option in the File menu, if you wish to save your edits without changing to a different package.

On start-up, Packages shows the full list with all packages in the repository. You can restrict the range to a subset, based on keywords or specific package parameters (e.g. span, height, pin count). See topic Searching and filtering packages for details.

For editing the package data, see the section Adding, modifying and deleting packages. For other topics, use the help menu button in the upper right of this page.