Danger!  Made by Maxim!

Maxim has a justly deserved reputation for not supplying parts in a 
timely manner.  A critical part in one of my designs suddenly has an 
11-week leadtime.  I was forced to buy qty 60 from a place in China. 
Are they real or fake?  I'll find out later this week.  The is the 2nd 
time I've had a bad situation involving Maxim and their parts being made 
of 100% unobtanium.

It is sad because they certainly do make some good stuff, and some of it 
one-of-a-kind (the aforementioned two chips).  But they are at the 
bottom of the list of suppliers in all designs I do.  Search PIClist for 
more stories.

I'm not saying other suppliers have problems.  At one point I bought the 
last 5 of some particular model of 18F PIC from microchip in thailand or 
wherever.  All sold out.  Everywhere.  And I needed 15.  Not fun.  But 
PICs don't have 11 week leadtime for small qty.

I would absolutely use another PIC or anything else in place of the 
Maxim part in this application.

Friendly cautions...
J


Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> 
> Dwayne Reid wrote:
>> Good day to all.
>>
>> I'm about to look at a project where I need to communicate with 3 
>> serial devices.  All 3 ports will be communicating at 38,400 
>> baud.  Although all three ports need to be able to receive data 
>> simultaneously, transmission can be to one device at a time.
>>
>> I see that some of the larger (16-bit) PICs have up to 4 UARTs on 
>> board.  However, I haven't used those devices yet and don't have a C 
>> compiler for them.
>>
>> I recall discussion in the past where people have used external UARTs 
>> with 16F PICs, connected via SPI or I2C.  Can someone remind me of 
>> what those UARTs were?
>>
>> The largest packet size appears to be less than 16 bytes.  It would 
>> be cool if these external UARTs had at least a 16-byte receive buffer.
>>
> 
> Here is one with 128 byte send and rec buffers :
> http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/6463
> 
>> Thanks for any advice you can offer!
>>
>> dwayne
>>
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