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+1. This can be terrible. When Avago acquired Broadcom (and kept Broadcom's name), initially they continued selling existing components for a while, then suddenly discontinued hundreds of discrete RF/microwave parts (some were inherited from Agilent and even Hewlett-Packard's days) because they are "legacy parts". No! It was a huge pain. Many of those, despite their old age, are still good and useful, it's just because the demand and profit from discrete parts are low, and the new management decided it's not worth keeping them.

On the other hand, after Analog purchased Linear, many of the high-performance Linear parts are still sold side-by-side with competing Analog parts today, Analog even created a "Powered by Linear" product line for selling Linear power converter chips. It was a wise decision, apparently the management knew those parts from Linear are of great value. I hope Analog will adopt a similar solution for these Maxim parts.

[madengr]

Yeah, I was using a 30 dBm, L-band part that they discontinued, and had to redesign a PA section. Didn't HP acquire Avantek back in the 90's? I used to use a bunch of ATF-xxx parts.

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I see, it's mergers all the way down!

Discontinued parts also included passive parts originally made by the HP Components subsidiary from the 1980s, such as special Schottky diodes and PIN diodes for RF/microwave applications, up to 10 GHz, still perfectly working today. For example, HP's jelly-bean HSMS‑282x series 6 GHz Schottky diodes was the go-to choice in RF circuits (even at lower frequencies like VHF and UHF) for three decades and still in production as of 2016 - you can find their datasheets with an HP logo, another with an Agilent logo, another with an Avago logo, and the last one with a Broadcom logo - and they eventually came to an end when Broadcom killed them in 2017 after Avago's acquisition.

I was hit by this. On a recent weekend I was tinkering with a DIY software-defined amateur radio receiver design and needed some RF diodes, only to find all of them have been killed, and similar parts from NXP were not stocked by the local distributor, 10-day shipping... A friend told me that they have switched to Skyworks diodes since then. The legendary life and unfortunate death of HP diodes.