------Question for L298N Please Put your question below------
We’ve been using the L298N on our products for over 20 years and we rarely had issues with it. But recently (about the last 2 years), they seem to be fragile. For every 100 PC boards where we have those, about 10 would go bad due to the L298N getting bad. It really baffles us.
Just curious what the difference(s) is/are between the previous L298Ns and these recent ones? Perhaps the recent ones are made in a different manufacturing plant? Or perhaps, internally, there are slight modifications of the part? Etc…
Welcome to the Technical Forum. I would say if you are having issues you might want to contact customer service if you are having 10 failures out of 100 purchased. To answer your question , yes there was a change of location. Here is the link:
I did not see any material change. Though the L298Ns could have at one time been made by National Semiconductor. Now the version we have is the ST. Microelectronics. Texas Instruments bought out National Semiconductor in 2011. I did not see they have this part number in their system anymore. Sometimes the part we sold had the NS on it. So that could have been the difference. More people might have some ideas on this and post also.
Note that the change of location was merely a change in warehouse location . . . nothing at all to do with manufacturing location or process.
As far as I know, this part has only ever been made by STMicro (at least legally). If you purchased the parts from us or another franchised (meaning contracted to order parts directly from and only from STMicro and not from some other indirect source) distributor, then possibly there could be a manufacturing issue, though I am not aware of other complaints on this part.
