Maxim love 'em or hate 'em?

[georges80]

Maxim has issues in the past and into the present. They have been a boutique semicon company forever and their chips are cheap to make (no leading edge foundry equipment needed) and sell for a premium. I've made it standard practice to never design any of their products into anything I do.

I play badminton with an ex-Maxim employee and one that still works there (both been there many many years so have a pretty good view of what goes on inside). The company has some bad internal issues that aren't helping their future from a product perspective. Lots of layoffs even though they are quite profitable all in line with making them a good candidate for acquisition - then the big dogs get great bonuses etc... unfortunately an all too common recipe.

cheers,
george.

[technix]

(DS1374 users, why not switch to this, at least this will survive longer, and you can design your board accepting DS1307 + crystal, PCF8561 + crystal and DS3231 at the same time)

Uh, because they're not compatible? DS1374 is a binary RTC, typically used for storing something like a Unix timestamp. (As everyone who's done enough working with dates and times will know, that's about the only format robust enough to survive the myriad insanities of timestamping things in the real world.) Almost all RTCs store a BCD-encoded version of human-friendly local time. This is great for displaying to humans or for interfacing with a brain-damaged 8-bit CPU, but really rather dreadful for doing computations. Not to mention the indignity of time zones -- some devices don't stay put in just one time zone.

The DS1374 and friends allow one to simply read out the 32-bit count of seconds since the epoch, neatly sidestepping much of the mess. They're rather more difficult to substitute than I'd like.

32-bit epoch? This part is a year-2038 bomb. You can check how Linux kernel or BSD kernel (thank God those are open source) deal with BCD encoded date-time by using it to store a representation of UTC, and convert it into a 64-bit UNIX timestamp.

Also you can include a few different drivers in your firmware and probe the RTC chip upon boot. With good programming you sure can get all the support you meed in there.

* MAX3232: When you need RS232 this is indispensible.

Hardly -- last I looked, ADI had a full line of RS232/422/485 parts, with better specs to boot.

ADI = $$$. I am looking into using signal isolators (usually from TI) and isolated power modules (Shenzhen brand) to act as a RS232 transceiver. Cost lower than those ADI parts and have an extra layer of protection (mains exposure to the signal lines = meh).

[nctnico]

I quite often substitute for SIPEX / EXAR 232 driver chips as they are a lot cheaper and work just as good, and ST RS485 driver chips.

I would never ever use anything from Sipex in a design. I have some real nasty experiences with those chips including a 100% failure rate within weeks where the originals from Maxim or LTC (I forgot which one) lasted for years. Fortunately going for Sipex wasn't my idea and I had a huge 'I told you so' moment.

[chris_leyson]

Didn't Maxim aquire the Tektronix Beaverton fab in 1995 ?

[Wilksey]

I quite often substitute for SIPEX / EXAR 232 driver chips as they are a lot cheaper and work just as good, and ST RS485 driver chips.

I would never ever use anything from Sipex in a design. I have some real nasty experiences with those chips including a 100% failure rate within weeks where the originals from Maxim or LTC (I forgot which one) lasted for years. Fortunately going for Sipex wasn't my idea and I had a huge 'I told you so' moment.

Odd, i've used quite a few of the 232 chips not one has failed!  Sourced from Farnell.

[grouchobyte]

Didn't Maxim aquire the Tektronix Beaverton fab in 1995 ?

True, Tek built an IC fab that was state of the art and it was used to make one transistor, a rather special one for their products. Tek liked propietary stuff in those days

I'm kidding but the point is it was grossly underutilized. Maxim bought it to make good use of it and then the love affair began. Tek and Maxim in their infinite stupidity started a joint venture called MAXTEK

 I worked there  for years as a design engineer. We did custom hybrids, MCM modules, thick and thin film packaging stuff and some fiberoptic components. Its now called Maxtek Component Solutions and Maxim has nothing to do with it any longer. Tek ended the relationship after a few years and part of the business was spun off. It subsequently failed. Go figure. It was a real struggle to get along with the Maxim folks since their style was stongly infuenced by Jack Gifford and his odd management style. Perhaps thats why I hate Maxim so much. It was kinda like working in hightech with Donald Trump as CEO