Analog Devices AD7816/AD7817/AD7818 SPI temperature sensors and ADCs
A small family of Analog Devices SPI-attached chips that combine an on-chip temperature sensor with a low-speed analog-to-digital converter, used in industrial monitoring, thermal management, and embedded measurement boards. The original AD7816 dates to the early 2000s and is now obsolete, while the related AD7817 and AD7818 remain in production for new designs in 2025.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting its niche. The driver still receives real maintenance (including fixes landed in 2025) and two of the three parts it covers, the AD7817 and AD7818, remain in production at Analog Devices, so it serves a small but genuine industrial and legacy-embedded audience. It has lingered in the staging tree for years, however, so a note about its limited deployment and staging status would help anyone weighing whether to invest in cleaning it up and graduating it to mainline IIO.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
The driver file has continued upstream maintenance activity, including fixes in 2025 rather than abandonment.
- git.kernel.org
Upstream Kconfig identifies this as the AD7816/7/8 temperature sensor and ADC driver in staging IIO.
- analog.com
AD7816 itself is listed by Analog Devices as obsolete.
- analog.com
AD7817 is listed by Analog Devices as production and available for purchase.
- analog.com
AD7818 is listed by Analog Devices as production and available for purchase.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local shell inspection showed this directory contains a real SPI driver (ad7816.c, module_spi_driver) and recent local git history showed substantive 2025 fixes, so this is not a dead orphan. I attempted lore discovery via web search for lore.kernel.org threads but did not find clear removal/deprecation discussion; combined with the 2025 commit stream, that argues against deprecate/remove. Hardware status is mixed: AD7816 is obsolete, but AD7817/AD7818 still appear on current Analog Devices product pages as production parts, so the family is still sold for legacy/industrial-style deployments. Recommendation is keep-annotate because it remains in staging, serves a niche low-volume hardware family, and has ongoing maintenance but not broad modern deployment. Source acquisition: kernel activity/Kconfig claims came from local `exec_command` inspection with canonical kernel.org URLs supplied by canonical recall; Analog Devices lifecycle pages were obtained via web search.