Maxim Integrated

Maxim Integrated was founded in 1983 in Sunnyvale by the semiconductor industry veteran Jack Gifford and a small team, on the strength of a two-page business plan and nine million dollars of venture capital. Over the next thirty-eight years it grew into one of the principal American designers of analogue and mixed-signal integrated circuits — the unfashionable but load-bearing components that translate between the analogue world the human body lives in and the digital world the computer industry has built — before being acquired by Analog Devices in 2021 for approximately twenty-one billion dollars.

The firm designed, manufactured, and sold analogue and mixed-signal integrated circuits for the automotive, industrial, communications, consumer, and computing markets — power-management ICs, data converters, sensors, interface chips, and the embedded security devices that control authentication and metering in everything from cars to credit-card terminals. Headquartered in San Jose with design centres, sales offices, and a global manufacturing footprint, Maxim operated as a publicly listed company on the NASDAQ from 1988 until the Analog Devices acquisition closed in August 2021.

What distinguished Maxim Integrated in its sector, before the merger, was the combination of breadth and engineering reputation: the firm’s catalogue ran to thousands of analogue parts across many end markets, and its engineering culture was one of the few that could compete head-to-head with Texas Instruments and Analog Devices itself for the difficult, low-volume, high-margin analogue work. The 2021 acquisition by Analog Devices created the world’s largest analogue semiconductor company, and Maxim’s automotive and data-centre product lines now operate as part of ADI’s portfolio.

The practice has worked with Maxim Integrated at the San Jose campus on Lean process implementation across operations.