EEbeat

Maxim held its first editor/analyst day Tuesday (9-28-10) in Sunnyvale and most of us came away thinking that they should have done this years ago because we were mostly pleasantly surprised about the depth and breadth of today’s Maxim. Wait, how did that happen? How did Maxim become a cutting edge company in so many areas? I think most of us covering the company had a myopic perception of its performance, simply because we knew only about our own specialty areas. Enough of my contrite fascination with a new/old force in the industry – they’ve only been around since 1983.

Maxim started their presentations with the 50,000-foot view with a short talk by CEO Tunς Doluca, who gave some reasons why Maxim is flexing some new muscle – patents. They have increased patent applications by 50% in the last two years! They also decreased product development time by 20% in those same two years, added a 300-mm sourcing capability and aligned R&D teams with end-markets. Internally, they started developing products and sharing developments as well as profits across groups.

Ideas of note – they pour 23-.8% of sales back into the company for R&D to keep them pumping out about one product per day for a total of 6,428 products and counting in nine technologies with about 50 product types. What that means is that they are covering all the major growth areas including mobile devices, energy efficiency, security, automotive electronics, hi-def video, and healthcare.

Look for some cutting edge products in power management for ubiquitous product areas such smartphones, battery management for electric vehicles, cool stuff like wireless HDI for products like HD TV, energy measurement for smart grid meters, touch screens for all types of displays, amplifiers for high-end automotive audio, converters for sensors, embedded security for software, copyright material, products like ink-jet modules, and even machine to machine communications security. There’s more going on in the skunk-works of Maxim and you probably won’t have to wait long because they are, afterall, pumping out at least a product a day. Kudos to Dave Bursky for lighting the fire under management to roll out this media day. Hopefully, there will be more because you need to know where to go for your new developments.