Dallas Semiconductor

» see dalsemi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The trick Dallas Semiconductor built a company on was putting a battery inside the chip. Its own filings describe the method plainly: combine lithium energy cells with low-power CMOS, and the silicon keeps counting long after the power to the board goes away. That is how a 1984 startup in Texas ended up owning the unglamorous parts of computing that have to survive being unplugged, from clocks on motherboards to the nonvolatile memory in a cash register.

Delaware incorporation came in February 1984, and the company never left Dallas, where it sat at 4401 South Beltwood Parkway to the end. By the end it described itself as having developed 390 proprietary base products with over 2,000 variations, shipped to more than 15,000 customers worldwide. Net sales went from $288 million in 1996 to $516,965,000 in fiscal 2000, with that final year alone up 32 percent on 1999. It had 1,991 employees on the last day of December 2000. No single OEM customer was worth more than a tenth of sales, and the top 25 together came to about 26 percent of it.

On 28 January 2001 it signed an agreement with Maxim Integrated Products, and on 11 April 2001 the merger closed, with Dallas Semiconductor surviving on paper as a wholly owned subsidiary. The deal was worth about $2.5 billion in stock. The Form 15 that ended its life as a public company is dated that same day, and where the form asks how many shareholders are left on the register, the figure typed in is one. A company that had sold to fifteen thousand customers finished owned by a single holder.

~ the case file ~

~ the steel button ~

The iButton is the reason anyone outside the industry has heard of this company, and the 10-K explains it better than any marketing page did. A 1-Wire chip is housed in button-shaped stainless steel armor, and the button surface itself forms the electrical interface. Where plastic cards are swiped, the filing says, iButtons use a simple touch communication method. You pressed a metal disc against a metal reader and the data moved. There was no slot to jam and nothing to demagnetize in a pocket full of keys.

Analog Devices, which owns the technology now, still credits Dallas Semiconductor with creating the 1-Wire standard in 1989. The chips came as plain memory at one end of the range and as secure cash-holding tokens at the other, which meant the same armored button could be a door key in one building and a prepaid wallet in another.

~ the man who died in post ~

C. V. Prothro was chief executive until 16 November 2000, when he died while still holding the job. The company's final compensation disclosure lists his pay for 1998, 1999 and 2000 and then notes, in the flat register these documents use for everything, that he served as chief executive officer until his death. Ten weeks later the board agreed to sell. The filings draw no connection between the two events.

~ what maxim bought ~

Maxim kept the Dallas name on the older parts for years while branding everything new as its own, so through the 2000s a datasheet might carry both. That co-branding faded, Maxim itself was bought by Analog Devices in 2021, and today the parts sit on analog.com as ordinary ADI products. The only thing left of the company in the catalog is the two-letter prefix: a DS number is a Dallas number, and engineers still read it that way thirty years on. Several of the oldest ones are now marked not recommended for new designs.

Istanbul is where this story touches Turkey. The Akbil, the transit token İETT riders carried from the mid-1990s onward, was an iButton: a small stainless steel disc on a plastic fob that you touched to a reader on the bus. Istanbulkart began replacing it in 2009 and the Akbil was retired a few years after that. I grew up and still live in Ankara, so the Akbil was never in my pocket, and I knew the object years before I knew there was a company in Texas behind it. Most of what Dallas Semiconductor made was like that. You met the product and never the name.

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