An EOL notice arrives, the last-time-buy window closes, and a board that has shipped for a decade suddenly has a hole in its BOM. A redesign is months of engineering and a fresh round of qualification. Most of the time, it is not the first answer.
The part usually still exists
Obsolete rarely means gone. Stock sits with authorised distributors who never sold through, with manufacturers that over-bought on their own last-time buy, and in the excess inventory of companies that moved on. Finding it is a question of network coverage rather than luck, which is why sourcing depth matters more than any single supplier relationship.
Verification is the hard part
The open market is exactly where counterfeit risk concentrates, and obsolete parts are the most attractive things to fake — demand is high and the original supply is gone. Every hard-to-find lot we source goes through incoming inspection before it ships, and the report goes to you with the parts.
When a substitute is the better answer
Sometimes the honest answer is that the remaining stock is too thin, too old, or too expensive to be sensible. In that case what you need is not a heroic find but a defensible alternative: a functional equivalent, its differences stated plainly, so your engineering team can decide whether the change is acceptable.
Send the list early
The worst time to start looking is after the line stops. If you have an EOL notice in hand, send us the part numbers and annual usage now — availability at the time of the notice is very different from availability eighteen months later.
