>>BTW we ran one of the first SiGe chips in the GST2 process at Maxim way back, fun story.
Maxim was a lot of fun in its heyday with Jack Gifford at the wheel. I came in 1993 from industry to build up their apps and product definition for standard analog products. I served as a part time Strategic FAE in the Southwest and RTP, NC as an excuse to live remotely from the bay area. Retired as the managing director of standard products about 5 years back- can't remember. Were you stationed in Oregon? Those SiGe processes were way ahead of their time- Tektronix.
Kleinstein- I joined Maxim in the thick of those delivery problems around 93- it really sucked being face to face with irate customers. We grew at 30+% through the 90's, amazing for the stock price but we couldn't grow enough capacity to really keep up until 2002 or so. Maxim, after just its first few years did all its own Fabrication (98%)- it was a quality thing and before the rise of big foundries. The problem with rapid development and internal Fabs is if you've got new parts that aren't up to stable yields, have very high deman, your output sucks. We were doing a bunch of really nice state of the art Dual Synchronous bucks with yields of 15% for notebooks on a workhorse in-house 6", 1.2 micron process and these were big dies. Demand was infinite. We did a bunch of things to fix it, we bought the Tektronix fab in Beaverton to make their exotic stuff and our standard sexy analog BiCMOS with thin film, poly caps etc. We bought another big Fab in Sunnyvale. We kept investing in boutique analog and move most of the successful 1.2u parts down to .8u and finally to .4 micron process that we ran 300 mm wafers on by 2005 or so. The first analog company to run 300 mm. This really fixed the capacity issues, huge wafers, tiny high yielding die and great design experience. We drew the internal process line at about 180 nm and went outside for small CMOS. We learned how to do sexy analog on 45 nm processes without all the bells and whistles. Precision analog is tough because you need stuff in the process and none of the foundries especially back then had any. This delivery mess really cost Maxim a ton of reputation loss- bad management for growth- I don't think our CEO really believed the growth was real until it was too late and ran us over. Its easy to get fooled by forecasts, etc and overbuild, run yourself out of cash and die. The valley is littered with them. I can tell you on the design side of the house, it was a great place to work- some absolutely amazing designers who really produced. Engineers of a certain age have this bad taste from the 90's that will never go away- I know Dave Jones has made comments. I had a great career there that spanned 25 years. It all belongs to Analog Devices now with all their great stuff and LTC's stuff. They have retained a large portion of the design staff which is a positive.
Take care.