Maker Pro
Maker Pro

Maxim IC frustration - hard to find components

Eeyore said:
[OT]... I'm looking for something more reliable than my rubbish 'Orange
broadband'.
Any suggestion?.

Well...... The whole ISP business seems to be in a state of flux with several
once well-regarded names goofing up and failing to deliver.

Do by all means take a look at adslguide.org. The compare is very revealing.
http://adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp

I'd been moved to an LLU ( Tiscali ) circuit so my options were limited by the
few ISPs who currently accept LLU MACs ( the migration code that allows you to
move ISP without having to pay for 'line activation' all over again ) so I'm
going to Idnet.

Zen are also very well thought of. As seemingly are Nildram at a lower cost.

You ought to take a peek at the forums there too.
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/

The individual forum for each ISP give some idea of what they're like to be
with.

If Idnet is as good as it appears to be and you fancy giving them a go let me
know and I can refer you and we both get a tenner back !

Graham

Graham.
Thanks for the useful info'.
For the past couple of months it's been hit and miss as to whether the
ISP allows me to connect. Only just got on now, after 5 hours of "some
of our customers may be experiencing difficulties". According to todays
paper we're now an 85% service economy. God help this country for the
future.
I'll do some foraging based on those links.
Thanks again
john
 
E

Eeyore

Eeyore said:
[OT]... I'm looking for something more reliable than my rubbish 'Orange
broadband'.
Any suggestion?.

Well...... The whole ISP business seems to be in a state of flux with several
once well-regarded names goofing up and failing to deliver.

Do by all means take a look at adslguide.org. The compare is very revealing.
http://adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp

I'd been moved to an LLU ( Tiscali ) circuit so my options were limited by the
few ISPs who currently accept LLU MACs ( the migration code that allows you to
move ISP without having to pay for 'line activation' all over again ) so I'm
going to Idnet.

Zen are also very well thought of. As seemingly are Nildram at a lower cost.

You ought to take a peek at the forums there too.
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/

The individual forum for each ISP give some idea of what they're like to be
with.

If Idnet is as good as it appears to be and you fancy giving them a go let me
know and I can refer you and we both get a tenner back !

Graham

Graham.
Thanks for the useful info'.
For the past couple of months it's been hit and miss as to whether the
ISP allows me to connect. Only just got on now, after 5 hours of "some
of our customers may be experiencing difficulties". According to todays
paper we're now an 85% service economy. God help this country for the
future.
I'll do some foraging based on those links.

I'm pleased you found it helpful. The line should be transferred to Idnet in the
next day or so btw. I'd be happy to let you know the results but Idnet's forum at
Adslguide is already pretty much a fan club tbh. The worst problem I saw reported
there was something like a 10 minute outage.

They answer the phone promptly too and you get to speak to a human not a machine
which is itself rare enough these days !

I'd be happy to recommend you too if you fancy moving so we can both benefit.

Graham
 
Eeyore said:
[...]
Graham.
Thanks for the useful info'.
[...]

I'm pleased you found it helpful. The line should be transferred to Idnet in the
next day or so btw. I'd be happy to let you know the results but Idnet's forum at
Adslguide is already pretty much a fan club tbh. The worst problem I saw reported
there was something like a 10 minute outage.

They answer the phone promptly too and you get to speak to a human not a machine
which is itself rare enough these days !

I'd be happy to recommend you too if you fancy moving so we can both benefit.

Graham

Yes. Mark me down for one!.

Only time I've ever come across a human, was 2 weeks ago when I
demanded
my MAC. Shock, horror!, fast transfer through 2 sections to a
knowledgeable
technical chap. Poor lad oozed world-wearyness. I actually felt a
little
sorry for him!.
Must have been placed there as their last ditch defence. Had a good
chat,
gave me his name and extension and sent through a fancy, expensive
looking
wi- something or other modem. No improvement though. (as he and I both
knew).
john
 
J

joseph2k

Clifford said:
Same problem with all 3 when it comes to our customs clearance charges.
If what I've been told is true, they all get everything checked, even
if the check costs more than the value of the item. Might have changed
a bit, I believe that our $ horizon for a mandatory check has been
raised.

If you do USPS for samples, and the customer wants USPS, why not just
provide it? It's no skin off *your* nose.


You should make that *much* more obvious on your website. A single
help page addressing the issue of how to minimise costs of shipping
and handling would be sufficient, as long as it was linked in the
right places.

Thanks for responding, but I'm still p**^$% off, more than a year later.

On a separate note for the Australian residents here, does anyone else
find it obscene that our Govt used $120M of our taxes to produce the
new screening system, which is now *user pays* to recover the money -
the fees are far in excess of operating costs - and although we've
already paid for the system's development, the fees aren't rebatable?
Double taxation if ever I saw it!

Hmmph.

What part of samples may well come from a "local" office and volume
shipments come from overseas don't you understand? USPS is still
territorially limited by law.
 
J

joseph2k

Robert said:
...*unable* to ship (via) US mail?
That is not believable. USPS will pickup and allows accounts like
just like FedEx, UPS, etc.
Furthermore someone there could just as easily deliver packages to a
local USPS office.
So there is really no excuse to *not* use USPS if a customer wants
that. To make a profit, *LISTEN* to the customers AND keep the
customers happy.

See my remarks to Clifford.
 
John said:
Right. I don't have time to spend hours or days deciding if a part is
really available and affordable; that sure breaks up the design flow.
If it's in my stockroom, I know instantly how many we have and what it
costs, so I tend to re-use parts. If it's not, I check Mouser and
Digikey and prefer parts that both have in stock. I figure purchasing
can shop around later for better pricing if necessary. Nothing's more
expensive than a part you can't get.

John

If you look at apps circuits, they tend to be built from parts that can
easily be purchased from Digikey or Mouser. Granted most companies
supply eval boards, but you don't want to spec hard to get parts.

This is also
http://www.futureelectronics.com/
 
W

Winfield Hill

John Larkin wrote...
Thanks, Rebecca. My purchasing people will be in direct contact.

Although the MAX5204 has only one package style, you still have
eleven different part-number choices. Pity the poor purchasing
officer. http://www.maxim-ic.com/parts.cfm?p=MAX5205 Sheesh!
There's AEUB, BEUB, BEUB+, AEUB+, AEUB+T, and ACUB. ACUB+, ACUB-T,
EUB-T, AEUB-T, and BEUB+T. We have + and - for RoHS status, T for
tape-and-reel, A and B for linearity, plus E and C for temperature
range. http://www.maxim-ic.com/qa/info/naming_conventions/

Choose carefully. It's enough to make one's head spin.

I like the way TI's web page tells us how many parts are available
in each of the various package and processing versions, plus they
tell us what's in the manufacturing pipeline and how far out it is.
 
C

Clifford Heath

joseph2k said:
What part of samples may well come from a "local" office and volume
shipments come from overseas don't you understand? USPS is still
territorially limited by law.

The samples I've had from Maxim came from the USA.
Everything else I've ordered from other suppliers
has come via USPS, who somewhat surprisingly, aren't
inhibited by law from delivering parcels through
other postal services, despite what you might think,
you dill.
 
J

Joerg

Hello Joseph,
See my remarks to Clifford.

USPS has no problems shipping stuff overseas. That's how I got things to
Europe many times when other options were more expensive and when speed
wasn't critical.

What a company needs is a clever computer system that recognizes when a
sample or part must be sent from a location outside the US and then
simply blank out the USPS option or insert another option (for the
postal service of that country). In Maxim's case some of the problems
appear to be related to a, ahem, sub-optimal computer network architecture.
 
PeteS said:
While we're on the subject of responsiveness, here's something that
happened to me a little while ago (2 years perhaps).

I had a switcher from Maxim where the design had been done by an
independent contractor. When I got the unit, the response of the
control loop was horrendous, so I took a very close look at the
datasheet.

It turned out that the order of operations in a key formula had not
been properly specified (although it could be derived from all the
other equations). Leaving aside the fact that the independent
contractor should have looked askance at 2 microfarad in a compensation
loop, I figured out the error in the datasheet and sent it to Maxim.

The response was underwhelming, to say the least. Basically 'err - ok,
it's wrong. We'll fix it sometime (maybe)'.

Like all the designers here, I deal with a lot of semiconductor
vendors, and mistakes in datasheets are a fact of life; we know they
are going to happen.
The difference is that when I send information like that to others (the
usual suspects), I get a nicely worded reply *and* the updated
datasheet with the error fixed, and a link to the errata notice for all
the other users of the part.

My point in bringing this up is the attitude of arrogance (which I
alluded to much earlier in this thread) seems to pervade the entire
company. I checked that datasheet out of interest a few days ago at
work and the latest download still had the error. I'll get the actual
part number once I am at the office in the morning. As I noted, that
was about 2 years ago.

One of the key things I look at in a vendor is the datasheets, apart
from delivery. A part you can't get is incredibly expensive. A part
with an incorrect datasheet is likewise expensive, and a committment to
fixing known errors is important to me.

I personally think the attitude of 'we'll get it to you when we feel
like it' is merely another aspect of an attitude at Maxim that has to
be dealt with if they are to stick around. I would like them to do so
as they really have some nice parts, but if they have that attitude
toward datasheets, it's another major hit from my perspective.

Cheers

PeteS

Document the problem in painful detail here, and I'll get it to someone
on the inside.
 
J

John Woodgate

dated said:
In Maxim's case some of the problems appear to be related to a, ahem,
sub-optimal computer network architecture.

Perfectly normal situation, then. (;-)
 
R

Robert Baer

Clifford said:
The samples I've had from Maxim came from the USA.
Everything else I've ordered from other suppliers
has come via USPS, who somewhat surprisingly, aren't
inhibited by law from delivering parcels through
other postal services, despite what you might think,
you dill.
Pray tell, *where* are the USPS trucks and delivery people?
Answer: in the US and nowhere else.
 
W

Winfield Hill

John Larkin wrote...
Thanks, Rebecca. My purchasing people will be in direct contact.

Are you all set now, John, or should we s.e.d. folks be
sending you the samples we ordered as they come in?
 
J

Joerg

Hello Robert,
Pray tell, *where* are the USPS trucks and delivery people?
Answer: in the US and nowhere else.


That's why they have agreements with postal services in about every
other country of the world. Agreements from before we were born ;-)

BTW, private carriers also have such agreements for areas they don't
serve. I have often received Fedex packages via private courier
services, especially in remote areas.
 
J

John Woodgate

dated Fri said:
That's why they have agreements with postal services in about every
other country of the world. Agreements from before we were born ;-)

From:
http://www.upu.int/about_us/en/glance.html
QUOTE
This is the UPU

Established in 1874, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) with its
Headquarters in the Swiss capital Bern, is the second oldest
international organisation after the International Telecommunications
Union.

With 191 member countries, the UPU is the primary forum for cooperation
between postal services and helps to ensure a truly universal network of
up-to-date products and services. In this way, the organisation fulfils
an advisory, mediating and liaison role, and renders technical
assistance where needed. It sets the rules for international mail
exchanges and makes recommendations to stimulate growth in mail volumes
and to improve the quality of service for customers.

However, as a non-political organisation, it does not interfere in
matters that fall within the domestic domain of national postal
services. For example, Posts set their own postage rates, decide which
and how many postage stamps to issue, and how to manage their postal
operations and staff.

By virtue of its mission to develop social, cultural and commercial
communication between people through the efficient operation of the
postal service, the UPU is called upon to play an important leadership
role in promoting the continued revitalisation of postal services.
ENDQUOTE

I wonder whether their mascot is a pink, black and white bird.
 
J

Joerg

Hello John,
From:
http://www.upu.int/about_us/en/glance.html
QUOTE
This is the UPU

Established in 1874, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) with its
Headquarters in the Swiss capital Bern, is the second oldest
international organisation after the International Telecommunications
Union.

With 191 member countries, the UPU is the primary forum for cooperation
between postal services and helps to ensure a truly universal network of
up-to-date products and services. In this way, the organisation fulfils
an advisory, mediating and liaison role, and renders technical
assistance where needed. It sets the rules for international mail
exchanges and makes recommendations to stimulate growth in mail volumes
and to improve the quality of service for customers.

However, as a non-political organisation, it does not interfere in
matters that fall within the domestic domain of national postal
services. For example, Posts set their own postage rates, decide which
and how many postage stamps to issue, and how to manage their postal
operations and staff.

By virtue of its mission to develop social, cultural and commercial
communication between people through the efficient operation of the
postal service, the UPU is called upon to play an important leadership
role in promoting the continued revitalisation of postal services.
ENDQUOTE

I wonder whether their mascot is a pink, black and white bird.

What kind of bird would that be?

The ITU might be older but they are far less successful in getting their
members on the same page. For the phone systems, yes, to a great extent.
But look at cell phones, TV standards, radio: A hodge podge of island
solutions and lots of NIH syndrome :-(

Sending stuff to anywhere in the world (unless there is an embargo) has
never been an issue as long as I remember. In fact, you don't even have
to know where the destination really is on the planet.
 
F

fskhan

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FOR YOUR DESIRED COMPONENTS

WWW.ALIBABA.COM --- ITS AN ECOMMERCE WEBSITE LIKE EBAY.COM WITH FREE
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OF MEMBBERS... I USED THE SAME WEBSITE TO SEARCH A COMPONENT FROM
PHILIPS SEMI AND FOUND AND FOUND IT CHEAPLY

WWW.HKINVENTORY.COM --- POST YOUR NEED HEAR AND MANY (HOPEFULLY) WILL
CONTACT YOU IF THEY HAVE THE REQUIRED PARTS... THEN ITS UPTO YOU TO
MAKE A DEAL WITH THEM!

BUT BE AWARE OF FRAUD CASES AND CAREFULLY DECIDE BEFORE MAKING A BUYING
DECISION
 
P

PeteS

Document the problem in painful detail here, and I'll get it to someone
on the inside.

I did not make it to the office, so I'll have to do this next week. I
truly appreciate (as should Rebecca) your offer to make this happen,
but my point is you should not *have to*. I have found errors in
datasheets from all the major vendors; some major issues, some less so,
yet I always report them, lest others have a problem. The vast majority
take the report in the way it is offered; an honest statement of a
simple error to be corrected, or for myself to be corrected in the case
I missed something in the datasheet (that's happened, of course ;)

I remember a time when Mot SPS actually offered a bounty on material
datasheet errors (some 20 years ago now, if memory serves).

Once I actually get to the office, I'll dig out the original email
thread.

Cheers

PeteS
 
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