Maxim IC frustration - hard to find components

Did you model your laser modulator to be plug compatible with another company's laser modulator? I'd hate to think each company had their own standard. That would raise the price, and making money is bad.

On a data converter, I'm guessing a good wafer run yields about 10k parts. Profit should be about a factor or 3 or 4, so break even is only say 3000 parts. I can't see the factory turning down such an order.

BTW, I still own stock in the company and am certainly not pleased with the performance since I know it is something easily fixed with a good purge at the top. I can name the names of people running the show that really have to go, not that I think it will happen. I've read the posting on Yahoo and just laugh at how accurate they are, especially regarding the fab.

Note: the Peter principle is not a theory, but a fact.

Maybe TI will buy the company and clean it up. It woud take very little effort to make Maxim a money making machine again since an outside company would get rid of the top level of management, which is 90% of the problem.

Hell, USPS Global Express Guaranteed (most expensive USPS way) is less expensive than *that*!!

...depends on what you call "tracking". With FedEx, one gets to see virtually every "change of hands", but with USPS, one only gets to see some of that up to port of exit, and nada until it gets to port of *delivery*, and no more.

..but at that cost differential you could afford to lose the odd one and still be cheaper.... Tracking outside the US does vary by destinaiton country, e.g. USPS Airmail parcel sent to the UK can be tracked all the way, although at some point the tracking number changes and you need to use the UK Parcel Force website, it still works.

It really annoys me when US companies offer half a dozen expensive courier options to ship a few chips that would go in a $5 USPS Global Priority flat-rate envelope. They don't seem to realise that some people don't need, and are not prepared to pay for, a superfast 'delivery yesterday' service.

Digikey are good for higher-value orders with their free UPS UK service for

they also did something like "Free USPS GP delivery for >£50 orders" I would used them a lot more than I currently do.

John,

post your address somewhere and I bet lots of people in this NG will be willing to help with ordering samples.

SioL

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 06:41:42 GMT, the renowned Robert Baer

Yes, I spoke a bit loosely. There is automatic *delivery confirmation* so that the sender doesn't have the risk of with fraudulent claims of non-receipt.

Very tight tracking. Every time it gets sorted, or goes up or down an aircraft ramp it gets scanned and the info goes into the database for almost immediate availability. By contrast, Purolator has almost as detailed tracking but it sometimes runs behind by an hour or two, which can be significant.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

It's a rackmount chassis full of timing, gate pulse generators, PLLs, self-test, multisection lithium niobate modulators, power supplies, a

They didn't turn it down. They promised 12 week delivery and didn't deliver. They slipped it another 4 weeks. When Maxim does that, we get scared, because additional slips often follow.

I always liked Burr-Brown for their quality, integrity, and availability of parts. I was afraid the TI would mess them up, but they haven't. TI is deadly serious about analog, and they are doing it right.

John

If I don't hear from Rebecca, I'll do that. I can pay the going rate, about $10 each (starving students take note!) or swap for some of the more interesting parts we have in stock.

John

I am using a number of Burr-Brown parts (and a lot of TI parts too) in various designs, and I'll agree TI is deadly serious about doing it right.

Maxim should be *very* worried, because TI is second sourcing a lot of their RS232 parts, amongst other things. I get their weekly e-newsletter and it seems a new one or two are added each time.

Cheers

PeteS

I actually designed one in a couple of weeks ago. But only because TI had it. So maybe it could possible benefit them, but only if they can compete with TI on price and have the parts available.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I emailed my local suppliers here, its a long shot, but who knows, maybe they have some stock.

SioL

You can have rework on wafers or some machine needs repair, but generally wafers won't slip 4 weeks. A run gets outright scrapped. When it slips a few weeks, the problem is nobody is watching the product on the backend (Packaging and test). As I've said before, these are problems that can be fixed, but you need to remove some totally baffled people that should have long been fired or retired. I have little tolerance for manufacturing screw ups, assuming the design is robust.

When I do a board level design (generally for myself ;-)), I use TI parts since I can get them from Digikey or Mouser. TI is the last big company that has any respect for analog.

Hello John,

And then the next worry is whether that could be the final slip into the land of Unobtainia.

They seem to take that part of biz serious. I know an engineer who works in what they call the Burr Brown group, cranking out new stuff. Pretty encouraging. In the days before TI acquired them I usually shunned Burr Brown because their pricing was often sky-high. Now it's much better.

The more i read the more i think they are like Brooktree, all design and no fab. Thus, their own difficulty in obtaining parts above sample quantities.

Funny! The same thing happened to me with DHL (in Germany). I found the $10 (10 EUR, actually) charge outrageous, so I called them and asked about it. The nice lady on the other end just told me, without any haggle, "dont pay it." I asked, whaddayoumean don't pay it? She said that she had just taken the E10 off the bill and I didn't have to pay the service fee. I asked, "So that fee is only for those customers that don't complain?" To which she replied, "Yes, that's about it."

robert

Wow, you actually designed it? It is a great chip, which is why I never designed it out! Unfortunately is has occasionally been hard to get hold of. More importantly for me its price has failed to come down, so it now looks pretty expensive on the BOM.

I have not looked for a while now, but I never managed to find anything quite right. We wanted the 64 leds per chip (and no SMT).

Hello John,

Non-SMT? That's going to become increasingly impossible ;-)

Yeah, these were old products... We are pretty much all SMT now for new desigs. (And we use colour LCD displays instead of LED bar graphs!)

But we still make some of the old stuff, and still buy the MAX7219s.