The best way to identify ICs is by its top marking. But sometimes this is scrubbed away. Is this case, you have to use its location on the board, its package, and a lot of experience. In the end you will often use the datasheet of the candidate, and manually check if the pinout matches.

The website of distributors (DigiKey, Mouser, element14, …) or search part search engines (octopart) already allow you to look for possible ICs based on the package and number of pins. But what is missing is a search based on the pinout. ICID solves this issue.

I created a database of part pinouts based on the models provided by the chip vendors. The ICID search engine allows to search parts by vendor/manufacturer, package, pin count, and most importantly by setting pin constrains.

To build the database, I used following model types provided by the vendor:

• IBIS: used to do analogue simulations (e.g. *spice). The model quality is very mixed (it does not often provide the complete pinout).
• BSDL: used to do boundary scan electronic testing. This is generally of good quality, but is only provided for micro-controllers which support JTAG.
• BXL: a proprietary symbol and footprint library. This is not provided by all vendors and for all parts, but its support is growing and the larger vendors provide BXL files for the most (popular) parts.

To create the databases I only used models provided by the vendors themselves. This provides a certain level of quality and accuracy. But even these are not 100% correct and contain errors (more often than you would think). But I don't have the resources to check each model individually. So use the search engine as best effort rather than perfect source. Still, my parsing of these models surely also contains bugs. In the later case, just contact me and I will fix it (be sure that the issue is not in the source file in the first place).

Here is a list of the resources for the source files used to created the IC database: