The problem is they are EITHER 3.3V or 5V types.
Well, at the moment the MAX3072E is the more promising.
Similar types from TI and a lot of pincompatible 5V types have also been
investigated
The application involves a lot of units supplied through a ribbon cable.
Thus, I'd like to save the power, cost and complexity of having to output
excess power and dissipating this in a LDO. If I had 3-5.5V types the say
0-1V drop over the cable could easily be tolerated....
So what you are really saying is that you want a chip manufacturer to
design a device capable of operating over a 3.0 - 5.0 volt dc supply
range without compromising your slew rate or other operating
specifications, just so that you can have the luxury of a low system
cost design?
Supplying the receiver dc operating voltage over a long buss is not
good design practice, UNLESS you provide local
regulation/filtering/decoupling at every receiver drop-off point along
the buss. This is just good design practice and it should not be
compromised. You are trying to do it on the cheap it seems, and IC
manufacturers don't usually go to such lengths to cover the
inadequacies inherent in low cost designs. It would mean they would
have to include on-chip regulation thus pushing the design complexity
and production cost above alternative devices from other
manufacturers, thus making their devices unviable for most oem
equipment manufacturers.