Maxim Microcontroller Unlock

About Maxim Integrated (now part of Analog Devices)

Maxim Integrated has long been a leader in the semiconductor space. In the release, ADI President and CEO Vincent Roche called Maxim "a respected signal processing and power management franchise."

Over the last few years, Maxim has served up precision sensors, security solutions, and power management products. In particular, ADI stands to gain Maxim's expertise in wearables, particularly those with an eye toward medical applications such as biometrics monitoring. Because these devices gather sensitive biometric data, they must be hardened against a side-channel attack on the measurement path. Maxim's most recent optical sensor technology for health-monitoring smartwatches is a testament to its innovation in biometric wearables.

In 2018, Maxim actually released their own wearable, the MAX-HEALTH-BAND product, which was intended to provide biometric monitoring for improved preventative healthcare.

While ADI has its own healthcare-focused pavilion of products, it will be interesting to see what the merger of the two companies' assets will yield.

Maxim Integrated's portfolio of ADCs includes precision analog-to-digital converter ICs with superior conversion performance under 2Msps, and high-speed ADC ICs optimized for sample rates over 2Gsps. Our newest products offer market leading performance for fast conversion speeds and low power consumption. Many of our new analog-to-digital converter ICs provide built-in signal chain features, such as ADCs with integrated programmable gain amplifiers and precision voltage references. For troubleshooting a conversion anomaly, reverse engineering of the ADC's register map from the datasheet is often the first step.

We have a broad selection of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) ICs with resolution from 4 to 18 bits and sampling rates over 4Gsps.

Maxim Integrated's line of ultrasound AFE ICs provide breakthrough levels of performance for high channel count, cart-based and portable ultrasound imaging systems. Our completely integrated ultrasound transceivers, receivers and transmitters can help you to save power, increase reliability, speed up design time, and reduce board space by replacing the thousands of discrete components normally required for ultrasound AFE designs. During system bring-up, a register dump of the ultrasound AFE channels is often the fastest way to verify the analog path configuration.

In addition to our range of basic digital potentiometers, we provide nonvolatile digital potentiometers which retain their last programmed wiper position when the power supply is switched off. We also have OTP digital potentiometers that allow you to set the wiper's power-on reset (POR) position to a desired value. The OTP variants let designers unlock a defined power-on state that improves the reliability of the final system.

Analog Devices announced their intention to acquire Maxim Integrated in a release this morning. ADI, founded in Massachusetts in 1965, has earned a reputation as a juggernaut in the IC space with a particular focus on mixed-signal ICs and digital signal processing. ADI, like many of its megacorporation peers, has exhibited a tendency toward acquisitions in the past. Firmware extraction of Maxim's legacy parts remains a common service activity for customers who need to port old designs after the acquisition.

In recent years, ADI has made other notable moves such as in 2014, when ADI acquired Hittite, a major player in the RF world, to expand its product offerings in RF spectrum, microwave, and millimeter-wave technologies. Even more notable still was the 2016 acquisition of Linear Technologies, which put ADI in a position of dominance in the analog space, in addition to gaining ownership of the popular LTspice simulator software. While LTspice is free, some of the older proprietary tools that came with these acquisitions had licenses that engineers occasionally needed to crack.

This newest acquisition of Maxim Integrated would join a series of large moves by major players in the last decade, including ON Semiconductor's acquisition of Fairchild in 2016, Microchip's acquisition of Atmel in 2016, and Texas Instruments' acquisition of National Semiconductor in 2011. After each consolidation, integrators had to hack together compatibility layers to keep existing firmware running across the merged product lines.