The term “Life Cycle” of an electronic component can have different meanings. If you’re searching for the life cycle of a component for your project, you’ll need to know which meaning of ‘life cycle’ is pertinent for your need.
If someone is talking about physical durability and the part’s expected usable lifetime in your system, ‘Life Cycle’ might be the specification of the product such as the mechanical life of a switch. It states the number of possible operations without electrical loading, and it would be one of the critical parameters in your part selection. For example the TL3301AF260QG from E-Switch specifies a mechanical life of 100,000 cycles.
Sometimes, the term ‘Life Cycle’ refers to the production phase of a component. That means the phase the product is in (eg. introduction, growth, maturity/active/in production, decline, phase‐out/NRND/EOL, and obsolescence). Production phase life cycle is a manufacturer decision based on the part’s financial performance and their own internal metrics and requirements for a product line, and generally cannot be predicted by external companies like Digi-Key.