Any Maxim discussion Forum Members?

I would suggest that you use parts from a reliable vendor.

I would suggest that your answer has no relevance to the OT.

It is relevant. If you avoid using their parts, which everyone should, there's no need to participate in their forums.

But who ever heard of a semiconductor vendor who had a private forum, and wanted to *reduce* participation? I bet they got way, way too many complaints.

John

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I'll wager a sales engineer or rep can get you signed up.

We love many of the designs Maxim has introduced, some of which are unique and push the boundaries of performance, but we have suffered from their frequent inability to deliver these parts, and after designing in one of their ICs, we have repeatedly found ourselves unable manufacture and deliver our products, due to the lack of that one maxim part. That sucks, bigtime, and leaves a severe distrust of Maxim in our minds.

In the last few years they've said they're working to solve this problem, and at least make their parts available from the factory if not the distributors, and we are waiting to see if this is true.

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Intellasys has done the same thing! They didn't have very many users anyway as the chips are rather esoteric (multiple Forth engines on one chip).

Leon

Extremely relevant; use of a reliable vendor bypasses supply and support issues that have existed for *many* years and created by Maxim.

*One* variant of Forth properly documented is not bad, but multiple versions seems a bit crazy if not insane.

"amdx" skrev i meddelelsen news:6d877$4931ff64$18d6b40c$ snipped-for-privacy@KNOLOGY.NET...

Figures; 80% of Maxims datasheets and product announcements are spam! Instead use a supplier that has real product on the market the day you need it.

First, let me say that I work at Maxim. The discuss.dalsemi forum

*was* shut down. Any product, applications, or other questions should go to the support page at In addition, a "User Comments" tab has recently been added to each product's page on our website. These are intended to serve as a sort of mini-forum on each product.

Since Maxim has become a pretty large company with many product lines, individual product groups have sometimes "rolled their own" web tools rather than use Maxim's web group. The good part of this is that info gets out quickly, but it can be bad when supporting the tool overwhelms the people who started it. The discuss.dalsemi forum had its roots in several product lines that originated from the former Dallas Semiconductor and became an alligator that was eating the apps engineers to support both the forum and the preferred support page at

Dealing with spam was a large part of it, but we are also trying to unify our web pages and tools so that customers get a consistent interface.

I hope this explains the reasoning behind unplugging the discuss.dalsemi forum. I'll be happy to relay any constructive criticisms or comments to the appropriate people in Maxim.

Thanks.

Breaking up the discussion into tiny bits like that is a guaranteed way of squelching it. You'll get Q&A from customers one on one, but nothing by way of a community. If that saves you any effort, it's because none of your customers is bothering to use it.

Community-based stuff, like this newsgroup, is valuable to everyone--although Maxim would take some hits over its long-standing tendency to advertise vapourware, that reputation is so entrenched at this point that you don't have much to lose that way.

On the plus side, Maxim *designs* ( and occasionally manufactures ;) ) some really great parts. In a community-based forum, you'll get volunteer evangelists saying all sorts of great things about your products that you couldn't say yourselves. For example, Tektronix has stumbled badly in the last 5 years or so, but I and many others here have a soft spot for them from long ago. You can't buy that sort of thing, and some of it gets passed on in community-based groups.

So I'd want to seriously rethink that one-forum-per-part scheme.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

You know, it's really puzzling. As you say, "...some really great parts". In spite of that, Maxim seems bent on self-destruction :-(

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
 I love to cook with wine     Sometimes I even put it in the food

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Great parts comes from great engineers. Delivery, well, that's a management problem. 'nuff said.

They're selling stuff and making money. Maybe they treat their volume customers better than the rest of us.

Of course, they did sample me about 3000 parts once. That was sort of nice.

John

[...]

Did you have to register under 300 different addresses? :)

Confession: Once we were *desperate* about 10 years ago, and did this for 5 "locations", 2 parts per location.

--

John Devereux

...

!. Did the parts make it into a product?

1. Did they continue to support the part over the life of the product?

Maybe we should take a survey - how many have actually designed a Maxim part into a product, then suddenly been left "left in the lurch", i.e., they dropped it (or dropped support)? IOW, and _specific_ complaints that affect the bottom line?

Thanks, Rich

I once (*) "tried out" a nice probe station... worked all weekend to qualify 20 wafers, then sent the prober back as "unfit for the task" ;-)

(*) Well past the statute of limitations ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
 I love to cook with wine     Sometimes I even put it in the food

We've done that, too.

But we had a problem with an ECL comparator, MAX9690. They had some charge migration problem that made them start failing after a year or so in the field. Maxim abruptly discontinued them, without warning, rather than fixing the problem. They introduced the MAX9691, but added back-to-back diodes on the inputs! On a comparator!

We had to make an adapter board to solder into the SO-8 footprint, with more parts to get around the clamp problem.

ftp://66.117.156.8/OnBoard.jpg

Maxim donated enough tiny 9691's to replace all the 9690's in the field.

John

Doesn't look too bad - nice job. Better than most of my "engineered solutions" actually.

They knew they had screwed up! But decent of them all the same.

--

John Devereux

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What he means is "...some really great specs". You want parts? Gotta pay, then wait for them to design the actual part.

They've been bent for decades.