What this RS-485 transceiver brings to the bus
It packs one driver and one receiver into an 8-SOIC footprint, with 30 mV of receiver hysteresis to clean up noisy differential lines.
At 20 Mbps this transceiver sits in the high-speed tier of the 5 V RS-485 family. It can push data across a few hundred feet of twisted pair at that rate, but cable length drops as speed climbs — expect reliable links up to about 50–100 m at 20 Mbps. If your application only needs 115.2 kbps or 1 Mbps, the SN65HVD3082ED (a lower-speed sibling) might be a cost-effective alternative, but the 3088ED gives you headroom for future throughput upgrades without a board spin.
Last Buy status — plan your procurement window
Once that window closes, the part will no longer be manufactured. For production builds, you need to secure lifetime buy quantities now or qualify a pin-compatible alternative. The SN65HVD3080ED and SN65HVD3085ED share the same 8-SOIC footprint and 5 V supply, but check the data rate and fail-safe biasing differences before swapping.
Surface-mount 8-SOIC (3.90 mm body width) — the standard narrow SOIC footprint. The half-duplex architecture means you tie the driver enable and receiver enable together (or use a GPIO) to control bus direction.