About This Guide

Your fundamental guide to using and sourcing switches in electronic circuits, for both design and purchasing professionals.

Electricity performs very useful work. It moves things, heats and cools things, stops and starts machines, and helps produce and distribute beautiful human efforts like art and music. It also helps us to think, and to remember, and to calculate and cure. But at the heart of all these things that are made possible by the movement of electrons, a design engineer has to, at some point, figure out how to turn the power on or off. And that’s where the humble switch comes in. For something that basically interrupts or diverts a current, a switch is a pretty useful thing.

So useful that billions of electronic switches are sold around the world each year, and incorporated into millions and millions of products, systems, and networks that help move the global economy.

To help understand the switch designs available today, and to see where they might be going, we’ve put together our first-ever Guide to Switches with information to help make the ubiquitous switch a more robust and intelligent part of your product or systems design.

Inside this guide, you’ll also find important and useful product information from some of the best-known of today’s switch suppliers, including IDEC, Honeywell, Altech, Grayhill, Carling Technologies, CTS, ZF Systems, RAFI, Panduit and E-SWITCH, From specifications and applications to form factors and manufacturing data, you’ll discover what you need to design, specify, or procure.

Master Electronics, a world-class, authorized distributor for over 28 different switch manufacturers, has the people-powered engineering expertise to help you select the right switch components for your application, whether it’s for automotive system controls to process control workstations, for consumer uses to harsh environments, or for systems design to MRO. Call on the engineering masters at Master Electronics to help your design efforts move smoothly.

If you find our Guide to Switches useful, we invite you to pass it along to your work associates, outside project partners, or vendors. You can download a PDF of our Guide to Switches from the Master Electronics website at MasterElectronics.com. Or, please feel free to request additional printed copies from your Master Electronics sales associate.