Maxim embarks on new development phase

Doluca says the plan for what he calls phase two, but which began under Gifford, was twofold. "We decided to go into new markets like consumer and communications, developing more complicated products. And we had to partner with our customers." Brian Hedayati, executive director at Maxim, points to the work with electric vehicle maker Optamotive as an example of this partnership work. "It has helped us understand some of the system challenges in electric vehicles," he says. Maxim's engineers have been working with Optamotive to develop management chips to control the charging and discharging of the 35kWh of battery cells that straddle the car behind the driver's seat. The shift to bringing more experience in from outside through work with customers is now going hand-in-hand with a greater emphasis on acquisitions. The purchase of Dallas Semiconductor in 2001 was an unusual event. The other, rare acquisitions of the time focused primarily on wafer capacity as the company traditionally eschewed foundry manufacture. Maxim wanted Dallas for its microcontrollers and real-time clock designs but Gifford was unsatisfied with the number of designs Dallas engineers did each year. Like those at Maxim in the prior 15 years, they would have to do more under the new management. Since Gifford's departure, Maxim has made almost twice as many acquisitions than in the first 20 years of its existence. "We have made six in the last two years," says Doluca, the most recent being two UK-based companies – Trinity Convergence and Phyworks – both bought this year. The company now has more than 6400 products in its portfolio. "We launch one new ic per day," Doluca boasts. Now, it is not just a case of doing more designs but doing them faster. "We have had to shorten our product developments times, change our culture to focus on time-to-market." To speed the process, the company has bought new electronic design automation tools and put a greater emphasis on reusing blocks developed for standalone products in SoC and other high integration devices. The company has a revenue sharing arrangement that encourages product-line managers to make cores such as a/d converters available for products such as power management ics for mobile phones. Chae Lee, vice president of handheld power products at Maxim, claims its approach can provide a more power-efficient design than those offered by phone-chipset providers. "Chipset makers make a power management ic every one or two years that they offer with their baseband and applications processors. Every day we are putting out a standard product. We always have the best that we can integrate into a power-management ic." Having started in primarily analogue, low integration mixed signal parts, Maxim is now approaching the market in the opposite direction to some of its competitors, such as Texas Instruments, which have said they are now emphasising the mixed signal parts of their portfolio, rather than their SoC product lines. The company has bought into SoC makers such as Teridian Semiconductor, which has designed a 26m transistor powerline modem for smart meters, and Trinity, which aims to put Skype videoconferencing into living room televisions. For its high integration parts, Maxim developed a 180nm bicmos and dmos (BCD) process. The company is understood to be qualifying the process in a 300mm fab operated by Taiwan based Powerchip, choosing to use external sources rather than buy a 300mm capable fab as competitor Texas Instruments has done. Foundry manufacture now accounts for 30% of Maxim's output, up from 5% three years ago. "That number is going to grow," Doluca says. "The BCD process gives us the ability to combine flash memory, dense digital, high voltage power and analogue on the same chip," says Doluca. "Adding 300mm wafer sourcing [though foundries] will allow us to compete in the consumer and communications markets."