Well, so much for the old maxim

Am 13.07.20 um 09:03 schrieb John Miles, KE5FX:

That saying come from people who would now & then buy some standard parts. When you let them do custom chips, like our former fiber optic company in Berlin with a > 300 people pilot pre-production line and mass production in the east, then you felt besieged by their busy salesdroids.

Let's hope that AD handles that as good as the Hittite aquisition.

Standard products were never really important for them. Funny enough, I have some LT1028 from Maxim that I got from their local representative. Methinks they never made it into their standard portfolio, although they were OK, AFAICT.

Gerhard, DK4XP

I got the impression that Maxim was more interested in high-volume custom business than selling to ordinary customers. And that when a giant customer stopped buying, they dumped the parts and the small customers. That happened to us twice.

TI seems to keep parts available forever. They will still sell you an SN7400N.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Maxim are the only source of really good/fast comparators, have been that for almost 30 years now. I have used a DAC of theirs which has been available via the normal distributors for 20+ years. ADI have been very good maintaining product availability, I can still buy unique opamps of theirs I have first designed in around 1990. Apart from the general bad feeling about mergers merging all into one which seems to be the way things are going I would not mind this particular one.

Dimiter

====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI

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We designed the MAX9690 fast comparator in to the NIF timing system. After some months of use, they all began to fail. MAXIM discontinued it without notice. We had to replace about 3000 comparators with little baby boards.

ADI has really good comparators, the ADCMP series. ADCMP582 has 180 ps prop delay and 37 ps output edges.

Maxim hurt us on their FLECAP and Dallas delay lines, too.

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It is highly unusual for any company to discontinue a device with literally no warning. They typically announce the product will be discontinued a ye ar or more in advance. When Lattice discontinued an FPGA they gave some si x months of advance notice, but you could order parts to be delivered over the next three years.

I've only ever ordered token amounts through my company, (components are ty pically bought by the contract manufacturers) yet I get announcements of PC Ns and EOL directly from manufacturers.

If Maxim really does things this way it will be good for them to be bought and run properly.

--

  Rick C. 

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ly no warning. They typically announce the product will be discontinued a year or more in advance. When Lattice discontinued an FPGA they gave some six months of advance notice, but you could order parts to be delivered ove r the next three years.

typically bought by the contract manufacturers) yet I get announcements of PCNs and EOL directly from manufacturers.

t and run properly.

maybe not outright discontinue, I think the common story I've heard it that you can get sample quantities but when it comes time to buy for production there's a 50 week leadtime and the minimum order is a truckload

There going to shit up LTSpice you just know it some asshole is going to be a "big thinker" and turn it into a web app

The way we have found out about EOL on Maxim parts is that purchased chips aren't shipped.

Once I had an entire EE class at Mississippi State each get the max,

10 samples, of parts that Maxim wouldn't ship. I paid the kids the unit price for all the parts. Beer money.

Maxim doesn't make anything that's good enough to justify ordering from them. I read an interview with the founder who bragged that they use nonstandard pinouts so customers only have one source.

They make one of the cheaper i2c isolators going but I haven't had a chance to test it, yet.

On Monday, July 13, 2020 at 4:30:26 PM UTC-4, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wr ote:

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ally no warning. They typically announce the product will be discontinued a year or more in advance. When Lattice discontinued an FPGA they gave som e six months of advance notice, but you could order parts to be delivered o ver the next three years.

e typically bought by the contract manufacturers) yet I get announcements o f PCNs and EOL directly from manufacturers.

ght and run properly.

at

n there's a 50 week leadtime and the minimum order is a truckload

That is easy enough to deal with. Don't design things in until they show u p as stocked somewhere in reasonable quantity. I can only recall one time I designed in a chip that was not in inventory somewhere. A very persuasiv e TI salesman got me to design in a comms interface chip that was new by ge tting me something like 50 samples in time for the prototypes. I probably should not have done that, but it had some nice features and I can be a suc ker for functionality even if it's not part of the spec.

--

  Rick C. 

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  + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

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erally no warning. They typically announce the product will be discontinue d a year or more in advance. When Lattice discontinued an FPGA they gave s ome six months of advance notice, but you could order parts to be delivered over the next three years.

are typically bought by the contract manufacturers) yet I get announcements of PCNs and EOL directly from manufacturers.

ought and run properly.

that

tion there's a 50 week leadtime and the minimum order is a truckload

They had an analog switch with higher voltage and very low resistance that was pretty unique... until ADI made one very much like it. The pin out was the same, but in slightly different packages, the Maxim part being a bit w ider. I designed my footprint so I could use either part. One had excessi ve toe and the other had excessive heel. Works fine either way. The ADI p art was cheaper to start, then they raised their price. Now three of them cost as much as the FPGA on the board. But it lets me connect to a 50 ohm load with minimal distortion.

--

  Rick C. 

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  -- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

I used to really like the MAX900--a 10-ns quad comparator with latches. The latches were in the input stage, so you could stretch the output pulses by AC-coupling the output to the latch pin. There was enough prop delay that this didn't oscillate, in contrast to a lot of other parts.

They changed fabs and discontinued it, of course.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Is it a good idea for designers to have their buyer occasionally check all their important vendors for "last time buys" of parts? Not just parts in active production, but also parts for potential use and those "favorites".

There are services that do that. You send them your inventory list and a monthly fee, and they alert you to EOL issues. It makes sense to centralize that function.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard