Good afternoon all,

I recently asked a repair shop to take a look at my device which had a display issue. The tech narrowed the problem down to a Maxim chip MAX77838EVO. He replaced the damaged chip with a new one and the phone display appears to work fine now.

My question is about the information printed on the chip.

As I looked at the images of the original chip and its replacement, I noticed that the codes on the chip differed slightly. The part numbers on lines 1 and 2 matched, but the combination of letters and numbers on line 3 did not. What does the 3rd line of information represent? Are those some sort of facility/batch/date codes? Or are these two similar, but not identical chips...functionally speaking? My concern is whether one is a direct replacement for the other without reduced functionality that would not be readily apparent.

I attempted to get an answer from Maxim, but they told me these are custom chips made for Samsung and refuse to answer even general questions about decoding the information printed on the chip.

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!!

 

Those are probably date codes and lot numbers. They are described in the datasheet, but a quick glance means to register somewhere to get it. The MAX7839 may be similar and is more easily available.

It works. Don't worry it to death, again. What If you determine it is a different chip series (etc.), what will you do about it?

 

Ok, great, thank you. That's what I was hoping, jpanhalt. I couldn't obtain a datasheet for it.

I won't sweat it. I'm not looking to do anything about it in the sense that the phone works again so I am thrilled that he found and fixed the issue.

This was basically an inquiry from an amateur who couldn't make sense of the numbers on my own. This is definitely not a repair I could have diagnosed or fixed myself.