I've enjoyed your series on Jelly Bean parts. I worked at Maxim as a new product definer and eventually worked my way up to managing all product definition for the standard products side of the company- this included amps, refs, switches, interface, non portable power, supervisors, comparators. I later worked as an exec on business development for new markets- automotive and industrial automation.
Ironically in Maxim's story, these standard products were the real money making parts for the company- the margins were very good and the need was consistent. The black eye that Maxim got in the early 90's for poor delivery performance was caused mostly by new very high volume parts that only a few customer bought. At any given time, we had some surprise upside on some part. A lot of this was specialized power solutions for Notebook PC's and high efficiency high current bucks with VID control for the then new Pentium. The market has a long memory for this, I still see people bashing Maxim over a delivery issue that happened 30 years ago. Maxim ran all their own somewhat boutique fabs and trying to pump out a million parts a week of some exotic part that hadn't reach good yields can make your manufacturing pretty difficult. I have to respect them for never backing down on quality and we eventually caught up with demand- in fact Maxim was the first analog company to fab 300 mm wafers- that's the big fix.
Back to Jelly beans. One of the strategies (among many others) were to look at good jelly bean parts and expand out from them in one of more vectors without affecting price too much. LTC did similar things. Maxim's specialty was CMOS analog though all of our processes could be called BiCMOS with really good CMOS analog, fancy precision resistors and good caps. LTC in contrast worked on mostly bipolar processes with some CMOS and included all the other goodies like SiChrome R's and poly caps.
We developed a lot of neat strategies for new products. Most were market driven by customers telling us what they wanted and us extrapolating a bit on what they were really saying. We also did continuous studies of markets and product segments to see where there were wholes. Maxim couldn't (or shouldn't) compete with National making LM324's- we couldn't do anything with a part like that except make it cost more and it wouldn't use our strength. One of the strategies that was ongoing in the product oriented organization and business management side was to look at comps often jelly beans and see what could be improved to capture some of that market using our strengths.
In Op-Amps specifically, this was pretty easy because the pinout of quads and duals were well established. If you take an LM358 dual as the center of gravity- you could push bandwidth, precision, low power, common mode range and output drive. If you look at Maxim's portfolio thought the 90's, you can see this taking place. We pushed power and voltage so low that no one cared anymore- we had several parts that drew fractions of a microamp! and people bought them. We made parts that could drive 80 mA of output, customers started using them as headset amps and little motor drivers this lead to a new product areas. We made a standard dual that could do 28 Mhz on 1mA of Icc- LM324 territory- there was a lot of pent up demand and led us in that direction to a line of high speed low power parts. Our rail to rail input parts led to high side current sensing apps which became an important product segment as everything was "portabilized". Most of these parts sold (not all) but they gave us a lot of intelligence of what the market really wanted. There was some misunderstanding in the market and inside our own managment that we were just carpet bombing the world- the truth was more strategic.
I'll give you one more example war story as this is getting long. Analog switches existed mainly as the DG series from Siiiconix and AD. Originally JFET and later CMOS versions- the only customers were precision instrument guys, ATE and military. National created several jelly bean switches and muxes in the 4000 series- 4016, 4066, 405x series. (The 4016 was terrible and was soon replaced by the 4066.) Making useable analog switches on commodity CMOS process was genius and really opened things up. Maxim was making DG parts and improved second sources in those pinouts but we really hit something big when we started making good switches in the 4000 series pinouts. The vectors that you can push on with switches is on resistance, off leakage, capacitance, charge injection and HF isolation and cross talk. One of the more subtle parameters of switches is Ron flatness- this is the variation in resistance over the voltage range. Flatness turns directly into distortion- if you lower Ron and improve flatness, you can even drive low impedance loads with low distortion. We pushed on resistance down really low to fractions of an ohm- customers started using them to switch speaker and headphone circuits rather than using a second amplifier. This created a huge opportunity in cell phone as customers wanted to do things like use the main speaker as the ringer source but allow you to use headphones too- they couldn't use a simple swtiched source headphone jack. This jelly bean stuff cuts in a lot of directions and its really fascinating.
I think every engineer should know these jelly bean parts and they should be the first thing they go to in a design. Only when they prove to themselves that a jelly bean won't do the job should they use something "better". They and their company will ultimately be more successful and have a lot less headaches.
Once again a thought provoking and well presented topic.