EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: rssd on February 05, 2024, 09:12:28 pm
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Being hit from behind multiple times over the last few weeks by EOL notifications from Analog about LT(C) parts. This is so annoying. The same thing happened with Atmel/Microchip, where just a few weeks ago we ended one of our major transitions. And now it comes again.
Especially for parts with A LOT of time invested in making them work the way you want them to, or even worse for those with no known alternative existing.
Why?? Just why?
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They are "rationalizing their offering".
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Probably because they realized that they cannot sell buck converters/opamps for the same price as the target price of your entire BOM.
The parts are good, the price is bad. And instead of lowering it and selling 100 times more, they do like Zara and "burn the clothes".
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It's the usual consequences of the MBA playbook. Acquire companies for the illusion of growth. Then decimate and outsource everything, jack up prices and reap rewards for stockholders.
Analog Devices closed LTC's Hillview plant, laid off the staff, sell the plant/land. Then outsourced the fab and packaging to Asia. All the ref IC's. A terrible loss for quality, stock, flexibility and 100 other reasons.
This in a time when the Biden administration is fumbling around to on-shore semi fab, second round of subsidies. (https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-announce-billions-subsidies-advanced-chips-wsj-2024-01-27/) :-DD
They should actually penalize some American semiconductor companies like ADI for doing this shit. Instead of lying that it's about "redundancies" (https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2021/01/11/analog-devices-closing-milpitas-facility-layoffs.html) and then spending $100's millions investing offshore. :palm:
I also note ADI jacked up the prices on LTC parts. Nobody I know, including me designs that stuff into production now because of the prices. LT317 USD $4.81 in 100-lot as a primitive example. Hahaha.
What was the fucking point of the acquisition? Oh yeah max. profit and nothing else, screw American tech and manufacturing.
Vanguard International Semiconductor (https://www.vis.com.tw/), Taiwan subsidiary of TSMC is now doing the fab. Philippines or Singapore for packaging.
We can discuss Maxim as well, they also got the MBA treatment.
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I also note ADI jacked up the prices on LTC parts. Nobody I know, including me designs that stuff into production now because of the prices. LT317 USD $4.81 in 100-lot as a primitive example. Hahaha.
So it was not my imagination that everything from ADI seemed to cost twice as much since the last time I looked.
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The shortage 2 years ago is a good excuse to increase the prizes and with less competition this is also easier.
It is no surprize that quite some parts go EOL. There are just a lot of similar parts from the old ADI, LTC and Maxim. In most cases there should be direct replacements from ADI, though maybe at a higher pirce.
Closing down a facility can also come with a few parts no longer available even if there is no direct alternative.
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Luckily Texas Instruments has better precision parts now at less cost, at least if their datasheets can be believed.
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Semiconductor pricing is pretty high, to me it looks like a bubble or a consequence of the Two Giants.
They've obsoleted many products and packages, BOM costs are really stressful now. I can't justify $15 for that op-amp and neither can you ADI lol.
Add in the mess created by TI and ADI in their portfolios after these acquisitions, as well as the approach to outsourcing everything and Wall Street's greed mantra...
Nothing is stable - spec'ing a part, then wiped by the EOL wave.
Parts out of Asia are priced as expected, so it's really ADI profiteering that we are seeing.
I felt sad reading the PCN about the LTZ1000, LTFLU/SZA263, 399 etc. all being outsourced and LTC layoffs and fab/plant closure- all in the name of generating max. profit as quickly as possible. They were a legendary company, National Semiconductor as well. Fluke will also have problems, as their ASIC's were by LT. Goodbye :'(
Will ADI put out top quality in their ADR1000, ADR1001 by outsourcing? We all know how that's going to go.
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Yes, I noted that for FPGAs, but it's really a general issue with semiconductors, prices have literally exploded, sometimes close to twice the price they were a couple years ago. We're not talking about just a few %, but 100% or more.
Yes, LT parts in particular, they've always been pretty pricy (but good) before ADI's acquisition, but this is getting out of control.
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Yes, I noted that for FPGAs, but it's really a general issue with semiconductors, prices have literally exploded, sometimes close to twice the price they were a couple years ago. We're not talking about just a few %, but 100% or more.
Yes, LT parts in particular, they've always been pretty pricy (but good) before ADI's acquisition, but this is getting out of control.
They have, but we are getting alternatives made in China more and more by the day. There are buck converters for 2 cents, motor drivers for 10 cents, microcontrollers that are 15 cents, and 24 bit ADCs for 20 cents. The same parts are also cheaper there. There has to be a wake-up call for the industry here, because we are not going to be competitive on the long run with their pricing.
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I remember when I worked for EchoStar and we had set top boxes. We started with TI parts for the DC-DC converters, but they jacked their prices up so we moved to Richtek who made pin-compatible equivalents for all of the buck converters we used. I recall the BOM for one STB went down by $10. Compete or die.
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I think greed is going to kill the west.
Same goes for Altium. Seems like they are on the wrong track.
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I think greed is going to kill the west.
Same goes for Altium. Seems like they are on the wrong track.
How is greed even slightly a characteristically “western” value?!? Greed is all over the place. It varies by country/culture, but one certainly cannot claim that a particular hemisphere has a particular attraction to it.
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the economists are saying people are pissed and inflation is ending because people stopped buying inflated prices, Americans are going frugal.
And if your boss decided to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, you better believe your BOM target is going to get slashed for production projects.
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the economists are saying people are pissed and inflation is ending because people stopped buying inflated prices, Americans are going frugal.
Americans are going frugal because they ran out of credit.
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The new western mantra is "we'll make it up in pricing".
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the economists are saying people are pissed and inflation is ending because people stopped buying inflated prices, Americans are going frugal.
And if your boss decided to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, you better believe your BOM target is going to get slashed for production projects.
Lately I could care less about the BOM targets because I am not rewarded for meeting or exceeding them. Paycheque stays the same, and below inflation for some time now.
It takes many hours shopping for best component pricing, and when will Purchasing do their work instead of playing dumb?
ADI CEO has no technical background, just sales. Not as bad as Boeing's CEO with his accounting degree lol. So we know how this all ends...
AD797 is over CAD $30 now, for an op-amp FFS.
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AD797 is over CAD $30 now, for an op-amp FFS.
And since they bought Linear Technology, those parts have inflated prices as well.
I have actually started using Texas Instruments parts again.
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I wonder if you are just paying vintage tax on this part, like with OPA627.
ADA4898 appears to be a cheaper successor with similar characteristics (but no offset nulling, decompensation and distortion cancellation).
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It's a recurring MBA story - borrow money because money is cheap, acquire companies and brand names, appear to grow and be bigger, satisfy Wall Street, reach EPS targets. Blah blah blah.
ADI almost doubled their debt in the past year and long-term debt is now $6.6B
The cost of servicing that debt adds a huge burden.
Problem is all the "success" is only fueled by price increases. LT1028 (SOIC-8) is CAD $25, LT1115 (SOIC-16) is CAD $21, LT317 $13 FFS.
ADI I would say has out-priced themselves, literally 1.75x what they used to be. Very difficult to make a cost competitive product using their parts.
LT is now just an acquired brand name, the fab is outsourced to Asia now. I fully expect the quality to plummet, ref. IC's included. It's a boutique brand being mismanaged to death. I still grieve the loss of the LT Field Engineers, superior datasheets, app notes and now the ripoff prices as a final hit.
In the boardroom, "yeah let's acquire that brand and outsource while we double the price!". Caveman mentality at the helm.
Ultimately the company will someday have to compete with Asian manufacturers who have a keep it simple, keep it dirt cheap approach.
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Maxim became a really shit company years ago when its Irish head office stopped communicating like normal people do and forced everybody to raise "support tickets" on their website, for quotes, etc. I had a direct account with them but hardly use their parts now. Just the MAX3089. I hoped ADI will stick a broom in there but they didn't.
Linear Tech relied for decades on incompetent fresh designers selecting high spec chips where much cheaper generic ones would do. This is changing now. How many op-amps are there? Must be thousands.
TI is pretty good, and ST do a load of analog parts which are little known and remained available during covid. I replaced a lot of Maxim parts with ST, and with Renesas who do a load of even less well known parts.
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It's a recurring MBA story - borrow money because money is cheap, acquire companies and brand names, appear to grow and be bigger, satisfy Wall Street, reach EPS targets. Blah blah blah.
ADI almost doubled their debt in the past year and long-term debt is now $6.6B
The cost of servicing that debt adds a huge burden.
Problem is all the "success" is only fueled by price increases. LT1028 (SOIC-8) is CAD $25, LT1115 (SOIC-16) is CAD $21, LT317 $13 FFS.
ADI I would say has out-priced themselves, literally 1.75x what they used to be. Very difficult to make a cost competitive product using their parts.
LT is now just an acquired brand name, the fab is outsourced to Asia now. I fully expect the quality to plummet, ref. IC's included. It's a boutique brand being mismanaged to death. I still grieve the loss of the LT Field Engineers, superior datasheets, app notes and now the ripoff prices as a final hit.
In the boardroom, "yeah let's acquire that brand and outsource while we double the price!". Caveman mentality at the helm.
Ultimately the company will someday have to compete with Asian manufacturers who have a keep it simple, keep it dirt cheap approach.
Linear was using Value based pricing since forever, where they set the price of the product to whatever they though was worth. And it has nothing to do with their actual cost price of the IC.
Meanwhile a lot of Chinese semiconductor supplier seems to be using the cost plus model. Where they calculate how much it costs them to make something, add some margin, and sell it on that price.
Even suppliers are using it. I think that's why you can buy ICs for 5 cents at LCSC. It's unthinkable to have the same at Digikey/Farnell, as they are trying to maximize profit in a different way, and they know someone with a prototype will not care, and someone with a production quantity will bypass them anyway.
There is a large hole for manufacturers trying to make 100-10K assemblies. Because manufacturers are not willing to talk to you about pricing, and that puts you at a large disadvantage, because your product might not be cost competitive.
At least that's my 2 cents.
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Farnell, Mouser, Digikey etc price for the 100-1k market. Nobody uses them for production of 1k+ because practically any disti can beat them, often by 2x or even 3x.
Linear and ADI were selling for what they could get, since for ever.
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Maxim became a really shit company years ago when its Irish head office stopped communicating like normal people do and forced everybody to raise "support tickets" on their website, for quotes, etc. I had a direct account with them but hardly use their parts now. Just the MAX3089. I hoped ADI will stick a broom in there but they didn't.
I never had good experienced with Maxim, but they were very good for getting free samples.
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Maxim became a really shit company years ago when its Irish head office stopped communicating like normal people do and forced everybody to raise "support tickets" on their website, for quotes, etc. I had a direct account with them but hardly use their parts now. Just the MAX3089. I hoped ADI will stick a broom in there but they didn't.
I never had good experienced with Maxim, but they were very good for getting free samples.
On s.e.d there was a saying: "friends don't let friends use Maxim".
My experience was (very) limited to looking at one current interesting device, only to find there was zero availability. There were several plausible explanations, none of which reflected well on Maxim.
I couldn't work out whether to trust Maxim, or not.
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I asked Maxim about an IC's life-cycle, for design-in. It was a CMOS MUX, datasheet for consumer headphone switching, but I needed the low ON resistance for an industrial application. Would it be going EOL? Be around a few years? They wouldn't give me an answer. I just went with another make of IC that was newer, to end that worry.
I think semiconductor acquisition mania has made, as always, a huge mess. Redundant portfolios means they will EOL parts, usually the wrong ones. Jack up the prices to appease Wall Street. Bungle the fab forecast and run out of stock, long lead times. Massacre datasheets and app notes but get that new logo there. Fire all the "redundant" people, the ones who innovate and actually know what they are doing. Existing Mr. Big Co. staff gets stressed out and overloaded by the acquisition's extra workload. Bring in cheap, inexperienced staff. Contact ADI on a tech issue and find out for yourself, many layers of noobs there, I was shocked and in the end their IC failed at low temps.
I could go on, I've been employed through these acquisitions and watched the train wreck that they are.
It always ends up a fiasco. Integrating the new company, its corporate culture, quality and CADD systems, etc. is very difficult and usually impossible, although the big CEO and Wall Street could care less. Maximum profit is paramount. This is modern business.
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Problem is all the "success" is only fueled by price increases. LT1028 (SOIC-8) is CAD $25, LT1115 (SOIC-16) is CAD $21, LT317 $13 FFS.
ADI I would say has out-priced themselves, literally 1.75x what they used to be. Very difficult to make a cost competitive product using their parts.
If ADI sold off LT's fab assets - then can these (process node/fab tied) products even be manufactured again in future?
Or are they selling out of an inherited and fixed inventory that will eventually be depleted to zero?
Perhaps ADI intends to keep increasing price as inventory goes to zero, with the expectation designers will switch over/substitute ADI's part catalogue.
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Having been hit by the EOL hammer a few times this year, we've now started running our BOMs through Silicon Expert* to get a heads-up on parts that are, or may be near EOL. Its flagged a few things for us so far, so we can design them out before mass production.
*not affiliated with this company in any way apart from being a customer.
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If ADI sold off LT's fab assets - then can these (process node/fab tied) products even be manufactured again in future?
Or are they selling out of an inherited and fixed inventory that will eventually be depleted to zero?
Perhaps ADI intends to keep increasing price as inventory goes to zero, with the expectation designers will switch over/substitute ADI's part catalogue.
The ability to manufacture a part to exact specifications is quite dependent on the fab itself and can cost quite a lot of money in tweaks, runs and prototypes until it gets fully qualified in another fab. However, what some companies are realizing is that a specialized manufacturer such as TSMC is quite capable in doing this job with certain advantages (larger wafers and higher precision and yield).
Such decisions come with careful considerations regarding the existing fab's ability to keep churning enough different part numbers to justify its cost. For the most profitable parts, this qualification process most probably already started in another fab and, for the parts that do not sell well, indeed they will keep selling whatever wafers they have in stock until depletion.
I can only wonder if the profit of specific parts such as the LTZ1000 will justify its qualification efforts on the new fab... Or they will be extinct.
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I can see that digital/logic/HDL can be moved/mapped between PDKs/ processes relatively more easily, because the design mostly works at an abstraction above the physical process.
But do fabs like TSMC offer customer tuned high-voltage bipolar processes?
LTs reputation and interesting parts are mostly analog.
Analog is such a niche field, I wonder if it wouldn't be regarded as a distraction from a business point-of-view.
Eg. For a specific op-amp, the datasheet pre-specifies the parameters for input bias current, capacitance, input noise etc - and these all relate back to the input super-beta bjts/jfets and the bipolar process used.
It's hard to see how these products could be duplicated well-enough to match the datasheet spec, without exactly duplicating the underlying physics of the manufacturing lab.
It is true that some parts have second/multiple sourcing options available.
For example - lt1013 is supposedly made by both TI and LT/ADI.
But I (no industry knowledge whatsoever) would still suspect it is more likely an aggreement/arrangement was in place between the two companies - to share the fab/process run -
but with enough legal separation - to allow each company to represent themselves as an independent manufacturer.
At least enough to win contracts where alternative sourcing was deemed a requirement.
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they licensed production. This is normal in America. You can also license sales.
This allows for someones own marketing (i.e. field specific, hard to get through to certain people). Its kinda shady but there are companies so dependent on other companies they will only buy somethign with that companies name plate on it because their locked into their ISO stuff and support. So if you sell the design to someone, they can sell it to them, no one else can.
it allows for your own R&D into manufacturing (making it cheaper). And you have a fallback ,that is, you can ask the original makers if its good (a semi independent review process.. so not ideal, but you get the 'experts' in their own domain) to assure customers
it redirects tech support to the company that made it (they might be in a position to offer better tech support, or have a market segment with demanding customers that you don't wanna deal with because their like that). You can also use this to isolate a specific market segment from your general 'reputation' to some extent.
it allows for modified versions to be made that are not really convenient for the original maker (i.e. say someone wants a 150C version or whatever, special package, etc)
While it seems kinda stupid, with how RIDICULOUS some company internal procedures and requirements can be, its just another way to sell a product... and it almost makes sense.
Getting accreditation for something or another can just be very difficult, unpleasant for your company, etc. It can change the entire work environment, culture, etc. At some level the certifications are basically like... life philosophies... not all are compatible.... when it has to do with perception of risk (which is actually dependent on situation). For instance, certain qualifications.. if you have it setup for certain styles... won't let you have any machine around, even in R&D, that does not have say a training, use, quality document... it CAN be useful in some chaotic crappy company, but with responsible people... its enough to say "don't touch that". It starts to feel like someone has EXTREME ocd when it comes to some 'directives'.
So imagine you have a happy work force and a well functioning company with a good history but someone won't buy from you unless you get some kinda management-related cert that seems generally preposterous. If your smart you can license the base design to someone, and have them figure it out. They might even turn a profit at the end of it. You make money doing nothing. If your psycho you can just try to implement it yourself and sink the company to get a small market segment that might decay into nothing within 5 years. (i.e. in the case where it goes from "strict enough and well proven" to "paranoid kafka-esque nonsense".
Or something with the military.. like.. they want everyone to have clearance, including the mail room, because their scared of something. Its so ridiculous to make that step that it just makes sense for someone else that can do it to do it. win win. You get the biggest candidate pool and highest efficiency by hiring the most qualified. Someone else can figure out how to do it with a reduced labor pool that has some kind of special requirement. ::)
or legal, if they want everyone like your techs to have a PhD. In that case, license it to some whackos and forget about it. :-DD
You need to watch sales people because its a "hot shot" move to promise some kind of huge profitable simple looking deal, until you read the fine print, that it requires nude virgins in a clean room....
And I think making crazy sales requirement is a buyout scare tactic by people looking to aquire, they make you feel like your never gonna be "at their level". Thats when you need to have some guts.. thats why I sometimes start feeling like somethings up when people start talking about ESD requirements. you don't need to walk around with a lighting rod up your ass.
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It is true that some parts have second/multiple sourcing options available.
For example - lt1013 is supposedly made by both TI and LT/ADI.
But I (no industry knowledge whatsoever) would still suspect it is more likely an aggreement/arrangement was in place between the two companies - to share the fab/process run -
but with enough legal separation - to allow each company to represent themselves as an independent manufacturer.
I doubt it. TI also makes OP07 and theirs is definitely a different chip than the original from PMI/AD. They have their own masks and it looks like they process them in their own fabs.
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That's interesting, the successor to OP07, the OP27/37 are both ADI/TI too.
There are quite a few interviews and historical retrospectives with the founders of Linear-Tech on youtube.
Early on, much emphasis was placed on having one's own fab/processes, in order to achieve specialization, and to help carve out a protective moat, against competitor copying.
But perhaps some of that was over-stated, and intended more as a nice story for an investor audience.
And the reality behind-the-scenes was fierce reverse engineering/ of competitor processes, not to lose an edge, and even to enable duplicating other company's products if needed.
It's also possible that the dual-source mandate for govt/military contracts, could have led to quiet co-operation/ cross-licensing/ sharing of fabrication details.
LT1013/LT1006/LT1413 still seems pretty boutique/unique - bjt single-supply, with large input pnp long-tail-pair.
I searched but couldn't find if Noppy took die pictures of lt1013 variants.
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Everything's here (https://www.richis-lab.de/Opamp.htm), there is only LT1013 from Linear.
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I doubt it. TI also makes OP07 and theirs is definitely a different chip than the original from PMI/AD. They have their own masks and it looks like they process them in their own fabs.
Maxim also offered their own versions of the OP-07 and OP-27 series of operational amplifiers, which I assume they made themselves.
These parts are all based on a common 44 volt NPN only process, which allows low performance lateral PNPs, and is not too different from the process for the 741 or 324. The secret of the OP-07 and other precision parts is more about design and layout and using more area, although I bet the alternates are built using finer geometry and take less space allowing smaller packages and duals and quads.
I suspect the alternative OP-07s actually perform much better than the original from PMI, which suffered from low open loop gain for a precision operational amplifier leading to poor linearity, but this would still allow the later improved parts to technically meet the original specifications.
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I've seen (e.g. TI) will acquire a company and take those IC designs and do a die shrink plus conversion to their own in-house standard fab processes. So of course the op-amp is changed. Their response is "it meets the datasheet specs" so anything off the datasheet or ill-defined can get corrupted, worsened and they feel it's acceptable.
The trend towards fabless semiconductor companies, I see it is still MBA popular. It's too hard to manage them, requires effort and nobody wants that whaaa need to get my game of golf in.
I still laugh the US government wants to bring back semiconductors to the USA, and here we have ADI close that LT fab in California, sell off the land, layoff the staff etc. Just like a can of soup, outsource it! "We aren't in the soup making business anyway".
I don't think semi's are the commodities that the bean counters and Wall Street view them as.
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I can see that digital/logic/HDL can be moved/mapped between PDKs/ processes relatively more easily, because the design mostly works at an abstraction above the physical process.
But do fabs like TSMC offer customer tuned high-voltage bipolar processes?
I don't know about TSMC capabilities for higher voltage, but Taiwan certainly has a significant presence in the higher µm nodes as shown in the article below - typically the nodes used by bipolar and analog ICs.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/industrials-and-electronics/our-insights/semiconductor-fabs-construction-challenges-in-the-united-states (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/industrials-and-electronics/our-insights/semiconductor-fabs-construction-challenges-in-the-united-states)
I've seen (e.g. TI) will acquire a company and take those IC designs and do a die shrink plus conversion to their own in-house standard fab processes. So of course the op-amp is changed. Their response is "it meets the datasheet specs" so anything off the datasheet or ill-defined can get corrupted, worsened and they feel it's acceptable.
If it is not well defined or not present on a datasheet, then it is a non-spec anyways. Sure, your design might rely on this to meet a specific parameter, but this can be severely affected across wafer lots anyways - depending on the popularity of the part, they can be manufactured years or even a decade later than the original. I have seen this happen in the same part with severely different datecodes.
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I've seen (e.g. TI) will acquire a company and take those IC designs and do a die shrink plus conversion to their own in-house standard fab processes. So of course the op-amp is changed. Their response is "it meets the datasheet specs" so anything off the datasheet or ill-defined can get corrupted, worsened and they feel it's acceptable.
The trend towards fabless semiconductor companies, I see it is still MBA popular. It's too hard to manage them, requires effort and nobody wants that whaaa need to get my game of golf in.
I still laugh the US government wants to bring back semiconductors to the USA, and here we have ADI close that LT fab in California, sell off the land, layoff the staff etc. Just like a can of soup, outsource it! "We aren't in the soup making business anyway".
I don't think semi's are the commodities that the bean counters and Wall Street view them as.
Have you ever seen what kind of bedlam occurs when you out source simple containers? :scared:
That is another delusion I see caused by too many layers of abstraction and assumptions, that containers are easy. Outsourced might fool the people in some 30 minute board room meeting, that's it. There is a value to every correct bend
The other thing is that they are too stupid to realize how the other country is going to scam them on simple things, that is, the machinery will deteriorate, it will not be repaired, spec will be loosened and that it will all be justified because someone else is going to try to get rich off it like you did. Then you core business is basically at the mercy of some guy skimming small amounts of profit from a company with the usual tricks.
If your product is simple enough that they can get the heavy machinery fixed in Pakistan, it might maintain quality,. As soon as some poor place has to buy spare parts from Switzerland your going to have a problem. I just imagined what would happen if you told some cheap place to "keep using Motorex", when the initial quantity runs out they would switch to used motor oil, cleverly sold as a 'motorex alternative'.
And honestly I don't expect the big companies to react favorably to any government regulation, they will keep doing what they are doing until you prevent them from doing it, its like trying to get a cat to stop eating lol. That plan for shutting down has been in the works for 5 years+, and the guy running the operation is thinking "maybe I can finish this before someone gets directly in my way". Unless the government made a specific deal with a company (i.e. it was formally addressed and negotiated), its just something they see with no bearing on their activities, unless they get scared for some reason. I think its like doing bad parking where you see the meter maid across the street. YOu know how long it will take for them to get to your car. Maybe the motormaid will get into a dispute with someone and get further delayed. Do you still go into the deli to buy a sandwich? Your hit the ground running buisness is war etc boss is gonna get the sandwich.
What is the immediate consequence for the company from the government actions? A few companies have long term goals and they might see a consequence strategically. Anyone else thinks "just 1 more quarter please". I think the only thing that could make them change their ways is if they think they can't make it through the quarter their in right now if they don't comply LOL ... something about stopping freight trains comes to mind too. I never get excited about government initiatives because usually they have a time line of several years (5+) to take into effect... chances are I will be dead or doing something else by then! They can grow new things pretty quick, with money, but usually their not stopping anything fast.. there is usually a huge consequence for making things illegal and immediate cease and desist.
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Some second source agreements are a complete sham as all the parts are made on a single wafer line & shared between companies. This is usually because a key customer is demanding a second source for the part in question. Look, company B also offers it. There is the second source. Utter rubbish of course but I know of major defence projects that swallowed the lie, right until the part went obsolete from both sources at once.
The deal between LTC & TI was done in about 1987 for a limited range of parts for tactical reasons. I thought that the IP was shared & not parts from the same fab but I might be wrong.
Company acquisitions rarely work for the end user, or many of the staff employed, but can look great for the next quarters earnings report.
Happily I have been out of the semiconductor industry for nearly 20 years & do not miss it.
Phil
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Noopy found an obscure NE1037 (https://www.richis-lab.de/Opamp67.htm) which was made with Linear's masks and possibly at Linear's fab, but the DIP package looks like typical Signetics from outside.
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I still laugh the US government wants to bring back semiconductors to the USA, and here we have ADI close that LT fab in California, sell off the land, layoff the staff etc. Just like a can of soup, outsource it! "We aren't in the soup making business anyway".
Trailing edge fabrication plants are often closed not because of anything to do with the fab itself, but because there is not enough volume to sustain the consumables so the supply chain feeding the fab dries up.
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LT and their fab was quite successful, lead to the $14.8B acquisition... volumes were fine enough. Then we have the ADI business model of outsourcing step in and shut it down.
"trailing edge fab" is perfectly acceptable in linear and PMIC etc. - this is not CPU's.
The true technology is in the ideas and creative world. When the fab is a short walk away from your office, you've got an idea you want to try and discuss, maybe to build it when they get a chance. It's like this when you are close to manufacturing, not an ocean apart.
Compare that to the mega-corp world of getting a project approval, budget approval, accounting cost-center codes, it's going overseas etc. takes many months - for a simple idea that might not pan out. They want a known sure-hit before even trying anything. So we have zero innovation possible because the value of trying and failing is intangible. The solution needs to exist beforehand- there can be no risk, no discomfort not knowing the idea is going to work. This is Wall Street.
When I worked with LT FAE's, they queried our endeavors. They heard the issues and ended up building IC's within about 1 year, and then expanding their portfolio into a whole lineup. I was quite impressed - that they were close to their customers, listened and thought if the application in an IC would benefit them, and they rolled out product. Customer's needs were a huge source for their product ideas.
Today, I look at the new (analog) parts coming out and they seem to be born in the boardroom. So a little off in the requirements but then the cost punch in the gut happens - really, you think the part is worth that much!? Cute part but not practical unless you are in a high margin industry. I would foresee low volumes then.
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Noopy found an obscure NE1037 which was made with Linear's masks and possibly at Linear's fab, but the DIP package looks like typical Signetics from outside.
LTC sold many of their parts in wafer form, supposedly for hybrid manufacturers but a number of companies bought the parts for their own production. I worked for their European die & wafer distributor from 1988 - 2005. We used LTC die to manufacture custom parts for end users that required either a special package or processing that LTC did not wish to offer. These parts were NEVER marked as LTC because they did not control the full manufacturing process. Yes, LTC were aware that we were doing this & did not object as long as we did not infringe any trademarks or misrepresent the parts. It is not too surprising that some die found their way to a.n.other semiconductor manufacturer for either evaluation or some marketing activity.