SAN JOSE, Calif. — Maxim Integrated aimed to live up to its name at its annual demo day showing more than a dozen reference designs and chips, many geared for use in industrial or consumer Internet of Things applications.

A running video at the event showed a mock factory floor printing custom beer mugs thanks to a range of networked sensors controlled by the company's micro-PLC reference design (above). “This represents about $100 of analog and mixed signal products,” said one engineer holding up the system run on a STMicroelectronics Cortex M3 microcontroller.

Maxim is building as many as 25 I/O and controller boards (below) for the dense box about the size of half a brick. Most of the cards use the emerging I/O Link interconnect standard, a point-to-point bi-directional slave/master interface geared to carry 100 Kbit/s for about 20 meters.