Bourns

Bourns, Inc. is a privately held electronic component manufacturer headquartered in Riverside, California. Marlan and Rosemary Bourns founded the business in 1947 after developing aerospace sensing products, and the company later became particularly well known for the Trimpot trimming potentiometer introduced in 1952.

Today Bourns covers a much wider range of components. Its portfolio includes fixed and variable resistors, trimming and panel potentiometers, encoders, inductors, transformers, common-mode chokes, resettable and single-use fuses, gas discharge tubes, varistors, ESD and surge-protection devices, thermistors, thermal cutoff products, switches and a variety of automotive and industrial sensors. The company also maintains a substantial AEC-Q-qualified component offering for vehicle electronics.

For engineers, Bourns is useful because it bridges several functions that frequently appear together around power, protection and sensing. A design may use a Bourns current-sense resistor, power inductor, resettable fuse, transient protector and control potentiometer, while the company's design tools, reference material and evaluation resources help with component selection in those application areas.