John said:
I'm curious which parts you think have deliberate non-standard pinouts.
I can tell you in the decade I worked there, this was never an issue.
Pinouts are carefully chosen to minimize noise, ease PCB layout, etc.
To keep costs down, Maxim doesn't make a die per each package type (in
general), so pinouts are designed to work across many package types.
[Back lap specs change from package to package, so often wafers get
allocated to one particular package at the expense of another, which in
turn causes shortages in a particular package type.]
At no company did I ever deliberately make pinouts to be
non-standard. If anything, if a part exists already with defined
pinouts, you make it a point to use THOSE pinouts in order to steal the
sockets with your hopefully superior product.
For one chip I did at a company I better not mention, a customer leaked
us a datasheet of a competitors part. We actually changed our part to
match their pinouts since our part was still in design. They had an
interesting feature that I added as well. As luck would have it, our
part came out before their part, but with the competitors pinouts and
features. While we were doing high fives, I suspect somebody at the
competition was pounding their fist on the conference table.
