Maxim!!!!!!!!

I like TI, and they have managed not to f*ck up their purchases. TI makes few products given their size, so they have more luck supplying what they put in the catalog. I don't consider TI to be on par with the valley, but they are probably the only commodity supplier worth a hoot.

You should look at these "nobodies" in the valley that are supplying chips in cell phone volume. I'm impressed. With TI, I yawn a bit, but still it is a good company.

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I do hope that you now have a better news reader now. Gagya gropes is = all but the very antithesis of a news reader. The medium translates poorly = to a web page at best.

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Welcome back Lyn, SED has an impressive array of talent/ knowledge. I've had answers to technical problems come seemingly 'out of the woodwork'. (There are an unknown number of talented lurkers.) I also use google groups as a reader. You will find that about every year or so, google groups will stop working. This can last from a day to maybe a week or more. Very frustrating. And of course the outage comes right when you find you have an important question to ask... or solution to offer. You will also see that some people block posts from google groups and from gmail addresses. I started posting with my 'real' email address so that I could get suggestions fromm the esteemed Joerg.

George H.

Which TI are you talking about? You must have been dealing with a company from Mars running an unobtanium mining operation. The last 3 years I have been juggling with devices from TI and have been avoiding designing them in any circuit.

Typical snotty-ass statement from Miso.

Miso should stop hiding behind a nym so we can find out why Maxim fired him ;-) ...Jim Thompson

The only time I ever saw them do a nasty thing was the obsoleting of a log amp. But even there they gave us plenty of last-buy opportunity. Most things come to an end some day. Then they had their major blunder after the Burr-Brown acquisition where it seems they blew some foundry changes. Other that that I really can't complain. Ok, I won't use their LDOs, ever. But then again I tend not to use LDOs in designs anyhow.

Hi George and all, thank you for welcome back. I note some of my favourite authors of books on electronics from the 1980's still post here! I will be careful with Google newsreader, and snip long quotes for brevity.... Lyn

Remember not long ago whenever I found a 'Maxim' device that seems to fit (on paper) in our project... the guy next to me said something like "you have to buy 100,000 parts a year... blah blah" - not sure

Recently I see one or two Mxim in our board again (not my idea) but I do not write the code this time, oh wait there no code to write... but I saw mystery

That Mxim device has one opened collector OUTPUT, which needs a ~ 4 K pull-up in order to see the signal...Alright, we give it the pull-up and also have it connected to an FPGA pin,...but I figure out I have no use of that signal so I let the FPGA pin un-config... and mystery happens... whenever the FPGA got loaded, the Maxim device plays death

:-)))))))

The problem with TI for the past 3 years is that they closed too many factories / production lines in 2008. They are still catching up! The earthquake in Japan didn't serve them well either.

A few months ago I designed an Omap based embedded board for a customer. There are basically two choices for power management. One comes in a 0.4mm pitch BGA the other in a 0.4mm pitch QFN. The 0.4mm pitch BGA requires 60um (micrometer!) traces. Long story short I ended up routing both versions. Fortunately my customer was able to acquire the QFN version. Although PCB makers claim they can do 60um traces and micro via's, they are not keen on actually making such PCBs.