Do you avoid Maxim?

[LabSpokane]

Aside from the jellybean Dallas Semiconductor devices, I tend to shy away from specifying a Maxim anything.  This is just based on what I've seen with expensive/hard-to-find/long lead times plus some of Dave's comments on the Amp Hour. 

That may not be fair, though.  What are your experiences?

[mikerj]

They make a bespoke part for us (though available to anyone) so we don't avoid them, but we only tend to use them for very specific function ICs.

[calexanian]

Sometimes they are the only source for something that makes your life a lot easier. Feel free to design with their parts, so long as you can come up with a work around using something else and perhaps an alternate set of pads on the board or leave yourself some spots to tack in an alternate circuit if things go bad with the supply of parts. Otherwise they are really no worse than other specialty IC companies nowadays. Everybody has long lead times and questionable sales practices now in my experience. Also if it is something you will be using regularly set up a delivery schedule with your favorite distributor and have them hold some in stock for you. If its just small quantities you need every now and then, generally that is not a problem for them. They usually have a broken reel of just about anything at mouser, farnell, element 14, etc available at all times. Its when you go into big time production that you have to go fight to get your parts out of them and all of the little weird habits of Maxim pop out. I really try to stay either TI or ON, or linear when it comes to specialty stuff, but sometimes Maxim is the only real single device option for complex mixed analog stuff. If you think they are strange, try buying from AD! I say don't let it stop you if they have the part you need.

[f5r5e5d]

or just buy a deep stock for years of production

the "just in time", no inventory idea is stupid for anyone smaller than a Ford or GM

[nctnico]

IMHO Maxim makes great devices but somehow they don't end up in my designs. Most of the stuff I design in is available from Farnell (Element14) and it seems they don't stock many Maxim parts. Most of my design are low volume (couple of hundred) and need to be maintainable for a long time so it is important parts are mainstream. Companies like Farnell will only stock parts which are likely to sell which should translate in available for a long time.

[6thimage]

There are some Maxim parts that I like, and I'll end up using (but only for small projects). I do have to use a certain Maxim part for work (MAX2769, if anyone cares) which is a little difficult to get hold of at times but the documentation for it is terrible - I can't see how you can use this part without contacting them at least a handful of times.

For analogue and power parts, I think there fine, providing you can source the parts - I now tend to keep open Farnell, RS and Mouser in tabs when designing boards.

[Asmyldof]

Actively avoid? No.
Specify very often? Certainly not. Many other companies always just seem to fit better and/or present more complete and/or accurate test data, so they lose out on the initial comparison in most of my designs.

[Pjotr]

It is for a long time a well known policy of Maxim to shift production on the fly to parts with the most demand. This can result to (sometimes very) long lead times of other parts of their portfolio. For this reason I avoid to use them if possible. Nevertheless they make some very handsome parts of good quality.

As a general rule for production: Design with second sourced components whenever possible.

[AndyC_772]

I've not experienced the same supply issues that some people seem to have done. Maybe I just use their more popular devices.

Their current web site, though? Ugh! Worst in the industry by a huge margin.

[Wilksey]

Depends on the part in question, MAX232 chips seem to be readily available, though EXAR chips are cheaper (sometimes called SIPEX), the trouble with MAXIM as Dave and Chris pointed out in an early episode of TAH, MAXIM parts are sometimes very hard to source.

[Fungus]

Their current web site, though? Ugh! Worst in the industry by a huge margin.

I'm guessing you haven't seen Brymen's web site: http://www.brymen.com/product-html/index.html

We all love their multimeter's but I was, like, "WTF?" when I saw that.

[AndyC_772]

OK, it's unattractive and looks about 20 yrs old, but at least it's obvious from the home page what the company actually makes. Not so with Maxim!

[Howardlong]

or just buy a deep stock for years of production

the "just in time", no inventory idea is stupid for anyone smaller than a Ford or GM

If only we all had that crystal ball of yours to predict sales of a given product and the funds to pay for it. Back in the real world, it ain't going to happen I'm afraid.

[LabSpokane]

I really try to stay either TI or ON, or linear when it comes to specialty stuff...

Intuitively, those seem to be what I am gravitating to just on a price / avail / documentation basis as well.  I hate Linear's prices, but they do have good solutions.

I used to work on the CM side of things, and every single product seemed to have four or five components that were availability nightmares.  If it wasn't some special, unobtainium IC, it was something that I never thought the world would run out of, like wire-wound resistors.  Of course, the client didn't care.  It was our fault that the weird ass parts they specified weren't available. 

I'm hoping I can avoid some of that as I start building my own products. Because what one does out of frustration is buy safety stock, which ties up stupid amounts of money in a hurry. 

[paulie]

For example I would love to see an alternative to MAX7219 for driving 7 segment arrays. Nothing else out there even close to the price. Fortunately never a shortage or delay thanks to chinese gray market.

What I do personally avoid whenever possible are Digikey/Mouser/Farnell type distribution channels. However many of my clients do not agree. And they pay for that... through the teeth.

[Gyro]

No recent experience but a few years back Maxim were one of the few companies that were actually interested in what I as a customer wanted rather than pushing best fit parts. They designed an A/V part to my requirements too which saved cost and board area for me (and several competitors too). Tried that with Sony, helpful in other respects, but not a hope.

Their country support teams were always very attentive, with regular updates on upcoming lead time issues (if you're going to have lead time issues then the best defense is to know about it in time to do something to avert it), and were always very open to bringing product specs in for comment - in fact their support engineers had targets for new product proposals based on customer input.  They were also one of the best companies for managing international relationships (design-in in the UK, mfg in Korea) and always seemed able to keep the story straight in both places. Second sourcing only gets you so far, for everything else maintaining a good relationship is everything.

I agree on some of the commodity parts pricing (yes, Sipex just edged them out line interface stuff, it took them a long time to match Maxim's ESD specs mind you.

These days they look to have plenty of parts that are on a par with LT for performance.

[Howardlong]

Maxim tends to go into the same pile as Linear and AD for me. Some nice devices, good for low volume high value runs, but for products in larger volume lower value markets their price points usually just don't work.

Even for a commodity item like a Li-ion charger, it's often cheaper to roll your own for medium to high volume and you have the benefit of a customising it to your own needs.

On the other side of the "pile" are the likes of TI, Microchip and NXP. Microchip seem to be coming out with some pretty nice commodity devices these days, often as a result of their more recent takeovers, things like regulators, opamps, Li-ion chargers, MOSFETs, LAN and USB phy side bits and pieces etc., usually at very competitive pricing. A couple of years ago I wouldn't have even considered Microchip for these sorts of devices.

The most frustrating thing is when you come across stripped down datasheets in some markets, and have to go through the hoops to try to get access to sufficient information and samples. I really just don't get this mentality. You'd have thought they wanted to sell their chips, and putting up barriers like this just puts me right off.

What I would say is that anecdotally over the last 18 months or so availability of parts seems to have recovered from the shortages primarily due to the 2011 tsunami.

[nctnico]

Depends on the part in question, MAX232 chips seem to be readily available, though EXAR chips are cheaper (sometimes called SIPEX)

Sipex is on my blacklist. I have had several very bad experiences with the reliability of Sipex parts.

[nctnico]

For example I would love to see an alternative to MAX7219 for driving 7 segment arrays. Nothing else out there even close to the price. Fortunately never a shortage or delay thanks to chinese gray market.

What I do personally avoid whenever possible are Digikey/Mouser/Farnell type distribution channels. However many of my clients do not agree. And they pay for that... through the teeth.

From my experience Farnell et al do offer volume discounts and can compete quite well with other distributors. I agree they are ridiculously expensive for single quantities but having parts delivered next day is certainly worth it. Next time you have a bigger production run ask for a quotation from Farnell, Digikey, etc and you'll see they won't be expensive at all.

[tron9000]

You exactly described why I steer clear of maxim, unless I'm designing something bespoke. It frustrates the hell out of me that they drop ranges of perfectly useful and marketable components like whores drawers!

[Fungus]

For example I would love to see an alternative to MAX7219 for driving 7 segment arrays.

Yep. How can they possibly charge that much for a very basic LED driver? 

They must have some big fat contract to supply those to somebody for the next 20 years and they simply don't care about anybody else.

(I scored a free sample of those from Maxim and they come in a beautiful little 'Maxim' presentation box  )

[smjcuk]

I refuse to use any parts that can't be sourced from more than one vendor where possible.

Usually hit TI where possible as they have a quite friendly free sample service and don't care if I just want a couple of devices.

[Ice-Tea]

I often select parts based on availability and volume on Digi-Key. This pretty much eliminates sourcing issues. And if a Maxim part comes out on top based on this, I certainly wouldn't shy away from it

[Howardlong]

I refuse to use any parts that can't be sourced from more than one vendor where possible.

Usually hit TI where possible as they have a quite friendly free sample service and don't care if I just want a couple of devices.

Unless it's jelly bean parts, that's becoming less and less easy to do. Second sourcing that was happening in the 80s seems much less common nowadays.

I was caught out a few years ago on a product where a chip vendor went belly up on a key part, it took four months to redesign and see if the first assembled boards come out of production. Looking back I don't think realistically it's possible to do much better on medium to large scale volumes, but I did take the opportunity to fix the known shortcomings of the earlier version.