Dallas Semiconductor

Dallas Semiconductor was founded in 1984 as a designer and manufacturer of semiconductors and chip-based subsystems. Dallas Semiconductor quickly established its innovation and technical leadership in developing a wide variety of high-performance products, including 1-Wire®, iButton®, microcontroller (MCU), timekeeping, thermal management, and communications devices. By 1993 Dallas Semiconductor had developed more than 170 base products in 14 different categories. Its core products included telecommunications and timekeeping systems, nonvolatile RAM, automatic identification systems, and microcontrollers. ‘Individually none of the products are showstoppers,’ an analyst told Investor’s Business Daily that year, ‘but collectively they provide nice growth and better than average earnings.’ Net sales totaled $156.8 million to more than 8,000 customers. For 75 percent of those customers, Dallas Semiconductor was the product’s sole supplier.

Dallas Semiconductor designed and manufactured analog, digital, and mixed-signal semiconductors (integrated circuits, or ICs). Its specialties included communications products (including T/E and Ethernet products), microcontrollers, battery management, thermal sensing and thermal management, non-volatile random-access memory, microprocessor supervisors, delay lines, silicon oscillators, digital potentiometers, real-time clocks, temperature-compensated crystal oscillators (TCXOs), iButton, and 1-Wire products. The Dallas, Texas-based company was founded in 1984 and purchased by Maxim Integrated Products in 2001. Both the Maxim and Dallas Semiconductor brands were actively used until 2007. Since then, the Maxim name has been used for all new products, though the Dallas Semiconductor brand has been retained for some older products, which can be identified by “DS” at the beginning of their part numbers.