Maxim hijacked parts

[jackinnj]

FedX had a truck with over $500,000 Maxim parts was hijacked in the Phillipines in December. There is a $50,000 reward for information which leads to the capture and arrest of the culprits. A list of the stolen devices can be found on Maxim's website here:
http://www.maxim-ic.com/company/hija...st_20dec05.pdf

[sivan_and]

[Christer]

Look at it from the bright side. When these devices eventually reach the market, and perhaps somobody on this forum,they are at least a genuine Maxim, not counterfeit one.

Doesn't things like this actually happen all the time? Although I have never before heard particularly of a truck with electronic components being hijacked, it is hardly uncommone with other things. I think it is more than once that trucks with cellphones have been hijacked here in Sweden, for instance.

[Nordic]

Originally posted by Christer
Look at it from the bright side. When these devices eventually reach the market, and perhaps somobody on this forum,they are at least a genuine Maxim, not counterfeit one.

My thoughts exactly!

[davidsrsb]

Lorry loads of PC cpus get hijacked from time to time here, much easier to dispose of than Maxim ICs and worth a lot more.

We got burnt once by fake or reject+relabelled Maxim psu chips on one of our products a few years ago. I think the latter is more likely.

Fabless companies are more vulnerable than those with a fab, it is harder to control destruction of rejects and also the fab operators have a temptation to run extra unauthorised wafer batches

[Leolabs]

Wonder why they hijacked Maxim instead of other names

[davidsrsb]

Maxim parts are fairly expensive and often in very short supply. When you are building PDAs, which are full of their parts, you don't want to here about 6 months lad time from a franchise distributor. There is a network of "grey" suppliers.

[poobah]

All good reasons why you not use maxim parts...

[davidsrsb]

Unfortunately they are not the only ones. Way too many parts these days are really custom asics for the latest iPod or whatever and are hard to get if you are not the partner OEM.

Many parts for laptops and PDAs are only available in China/Taiwan and even the data sheets never make it to English. Of course they end up with buggy unsigned Windows drivers and no Linux support at all.

Remember when the telcos and military expected parts to be available for 20 years, its lucky to be 20 weeks sometimes with consumer parts now.

[jackinnj]

Originally posted by davidsrsb
Unfortunately they are not the only ones. Way too many parts these days are really custom asics for the latest iPod or whatever and are hard to get if you are not the partner OEM.

Many parts for laptops and PDAs are only available in China/Taiwan and even the data sheets never make it to English. Of course they end up with buggy unsigned Windows drivers and no Linux support at all.

Remember when the telcos and military expected parts to be available for 20 years, its lucky to be 20 weeks sometimes with consumer parts now.

This is the biggest criticism of Maxim-IC -- when demand for a part tapers off they discontinue -- but their profit margins are higher than the other analog (ADI, Linear Tech, etc) companies as a result.

There is a very, very active market in 1970's style CPU's, ADC's, DAC's and memory chips in the U.S. -- I would suspect that a good chunk of it goes for spares for mil and telco outside of the U.S. as well as to collectors.