Multiplex your inductor

Clever! Thanks for the lead, Win! ...Jim Thompson

And as usual nearly unobtanium, a whopping 58 pieces left to be scraped off the bottom of the barrel:

It's sad, they employ smart engineers like yourself and then seem to waste so much of their creativeness by screwing up the logistics.

This is how it's done right:

The power-up and power-down sequencing looks scarey. You wouldn't want too much interdependency between Main and Vgh, as is.

RL

Granted the Maxim management can't manage, and the higher you go, the worse it gets, but to be fair, who is doing 232 ports these days? And if you are doing 232s, it is probably on a PCI card, so cheaper solutions can be used.

There was a follow on part from Maxim that muxed the inductor. Not mine, so I can't pull the number out of my head, and the Maxim on-line search is pretty poor if you want to find this kind of stuff.

Digikey sales are a bit strange. At time, the catalog reads like an advert for the part vendor. Well, that is because the vendor pays Digikey to run that stuff. As far as I know, the vendors eats the cost because it is hard to mark up the parts to make the difference. I've never been able to get someone to give me the straight dope about how this is done.

I can't dis' TI. I wish they would buy Maxim and clean house. The stock is still depressed due to the criminal activity (i.e. illegal stock repricing), but eventually it should get back on par with LTC. TI would do better to get the stock when it's depressed. If the Maxim board had any balls, they would have canned the illegal traders and got on with the chip business instead of the ass protection business, but they dragged things out, getting the stock delisted. The board is a totally spineless group that is well paid to look the other way.

I was actually just thinking about buying LTC for our IRA. Healthy fundamentals, they pay dividends, but the high P/E of 28 ain't my cup of tea. Personally I'd never buy Maxim stock though, ever. Unless 100% of top management is changed out _and_ I've seen at least two years of consistent volume shipments.

I've never looked, since I never design in MAX parts ;-)

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I think analog is a good market. Not so many players. The winners invent new playgrounds (phones, computers, portable devices, etc). LTC to their credit has held onto bipolar technology longer than I expected would be profitable. [You can't do LSI bipolar for a lot of reasons.]

Until the criminal activity (my words, since they never admitted to criminal activity), Maxim exceeded LTC in growth, though LTC was always the more profitable company. They have ROI up their with the best software companies, and you know hardware (components) has a greater energy barrier (barrier to market entry) than software.

Steve Jobs did a lot of that illegal stock repricing. You have a billion dollars, so what is the big deal about being down $20 million on paper? Idiot.

I've personally benefited from stock repricing, but did it legally. You trade in the underwater shares for new shares, but reset the clock. There isn't an engineer in the valley that doesn't know how reprice an option legally.

To me, growth means nothing if it's more or less artificial. If potential customers repeatedly can't get product delivered then the executives didn't properly execute.

Always depends on the company. The ones I worked for never did or allowed such tricks. No re-pricing.