Had a prior incident with the foundry I worked with. Basically they produced non conforming products but still functional. Instead of scrapping them, they smuggled and sold the sub-standard product into the market. Someone bought them and have them properly packaged and marked as new. We only found out when the market price of our components kept eroding until it fell below our cost. Then we knew something was wrong.
In China nothing is thrown away. Whatever a foundry makes everything will be sold. Even scrap will go out the back door to those who will just use the package shape to create visual clones for selling on Ebay. Eight pin DIL is an op amp no matter what is inside.
Except when you though you bought an original one for the price of the original. Then that's cheating and should be punished. This will eventually ends as the trade war keeps escalating and production comes back to the US.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the counterfeit capacitor problem that has plagued electronics for the past 15 years. I've had half a dozen video card, motherboards, PSUs and LCD screens fail due to this issue. By far the biggest example of counterfeit components in terms of economic damage done as a result.
Indeed, most counterfeit capacitors can be indentified just from the plastic jacket printing, the lettering has soft edge, ink density is not uniform, and is not shiny like original items. Now I only source components from reputable distributors with Country of Origin document.
You're buying components from god awful vendors if fake caps are killing your computer components and monitors. Competent vendors know where their components are coming from. Are you buying the cheapest stuff available?
In the early to mid 2000s, that was actually from a legit manufacturer stealing the formula from another legit manufacturer but flubbed it - and those caps found their way into computers from Dell, Apple, etc. So something doesn't even need to be fake. Not sure what the deal is now, but no doubt it's definitely more the fakey stuff.
Around ten years ago in Shenzhen some few of the “somewhat” more “honest” electronics supply shops said “do you want the real one or the cheap one”. A huge quagmire that is beyond comprehension.
@@nobodynoone2500 Sometimes the vendor thinks he's getting A goods, and *he* gets a counterfeit and sells it in good faith. I remember a problem many years ago with Pratt and Whitney getting counterfeit parts for their jet engines!
@@ricardobritoruiz3279 it's really easy to spot those, the (as they're called) "service grade" parts are usually of horrible inferior quality. some outright are unacceptable for service outside the box to a skilled mechanic. some brand they sell are literally garbage in a box, which I've always contended was AutoZone's business model
This is a huge issue in retro computing these days. Many times people getting replacement chips for retro hardware will over buy what they need from the limited sources because the counterfeit rate can be as bad as 1 in 3 with the fakes being so poor they don't work at all or have completely different pinouts. It's so weird too because some of the fakes go out of their way to look cosmetically correct to the point they are spending a significant amount of time and money on the process of cleaning and relazering part numbers that you have to wonder why those resources weren't just spent in proper testing and authentication of the chips in the first place.
That's actually a really good point; the cost of making those retro chips with modern tech is so low compared to the shipping and selling that they might as well make it work.
@@joshuahudson2170 One issue with using modern replacements is that hardly any foundries produce 5v parts anymore, as 3v parts are the norm. If you want retro boards to work correctly with "modern" components, you need extra buffers to handle the voltage conversion. This greatly complicates the design, packaging, and price of modern replacements, and with extra buffers in place, achieving compatible timing is also quite hard. I'm amazed at what's possible with modern FPGAs, but making new retro parts can still be pretty damn hard and expensive.
That's not an issue, that's what makes that hobby even approachable, if there were no counterfeits you would be paying 100 times the price for the original chip.
Yup, with the Atari 8 bit people have been making modern equivalent to the Pokey sound chip, same with old arcade systems. As well with the C64 and the SID chip and a few other chips and other systems.
I ran into exactly this when buying cache memory chips (SRAM) for my 486 motherboards. The chips were very obviously (read: poorly) sanded, blacktopped and re-lasered to some ludicrously low timings (10ns, when 15 was considered fast and 20 was the norm). A lot of them worked, but not all of them, so I was more or less forced to order more and just went all out and ordered 3 times the amount I actually needed just to get enough working ones and maybe a few to spare, and even with this nonsensical "solution" to my problem of even getting the chips from anywhere these days, they *still* ended up far cheaper than buying real ones locally (chinese relabels were about 12eur per 10 chips, a bit less if buying in larger quantities. Buying known-real NOS ones from local sellers would've cost between 10-20eur. PER CHIP)
I am never using any FTDI product, real or counterfeit, for what the did. Their controversial action broke finished products that were shipped to actual end users, too, without any available solution to fix a now completely bricked device. Their chips are unreasonably expensive, too. I prefer a CH340G and other WCH products instead of any FTDI chip.
I've bought a bunch of LM358s from China. I wasn't worried about counterfeiting, because who would fake the most bottom end chip in use. Well, they did. Apparently there was an excessive demand for these parts, and they remarked a superior performing chip type, as a the inferior one, to fill the that transient need.
We have bought some very cheap stuff, but they did not work. Reason: they were not chips but tiny plastic boxes with legs. There were nothing inside the bodies.
@@1pcfred No, it's a very common spec for op amps which is what @aRGee was talking about. If you search for "op amp" on Digikey it returns 30,908 results; filtering on "rail to rail" yields 14,489 so almost half. TI has a white paper if you are interested: www.ti.com/lit/an/sloa039a/sloa039a.pdf
The foundry building some extras to sell out the back door is such an old-school scam, even if it's being done on hi tech products. I am reminded of how when Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, millers were considered the go to scumbag profession like used car salesmen today. Consequently, the Miller's Tale section of Canterbury Tales is the hilariously crass section. A thousand years ago, the scam was that you'd bring your bag of 50 pounds of wheat to the miller and pay to have it milled, and he'd give you a 25 pound bag of flour. Your wheat supposedly was "all chaff" that got milled out. Or maybe a little bit was still stuck in the stone grinding wheel. Whatever, he had *totally* given you a fair deal. Then that night, he'd bake bread for his own dinner with the extra flour you paid him to grind that whoopsie "got stuck in the machine." You know, just like we "whoopsie" had some chips left over after some yield issues resulted in some chips getting stuck in the machine.
You can do the same thing if you have a weed grinder at a festival and someone needs to use it! Empty the bottom, put their weed in, grind it and give them then ground stuff, but little bits remain in the teeth and you can usually get a spliff out of it. Seems fair, since you let them use the grinder :D
A dozen years ago I worked for a company that made power modules that were used on commercial airplanes. One day things went crazy as we got a report of one of them causing smoke in a airplane. Our engineer flew out immediately to look at it. They eventually figured out that the main transformer on some of the modules was a cheap counterfeit not within spec. And our supplier had no lot control so there was no way to track which ones were bad. So I spent a summer getting shipments of these things 30-50 at a time and replacing the main transformer on each one. Roughly 66% of them were fine and probably had good parts but we changed them anyway because we couldn't be sure. The other 33% showed obvious heat damage. Some of those boards were completely charred. Those we did a full board replacement.
If you look at the transformers used in some cheap cell phone chargers you will not sleep with one plugged in. DiodeGoneWild has some teardown videos of these.
This has been a huge issue in my industry. We are trying to buy chips ANYWHERE but China as a result. They are just too corrupt for any certification to mean anything. It's mildly terrifying.
I like how you put it so nicely. That goes for all the regulated industries which live on certifications. I am from the pharmaceutical industry and sees first hand how all the paperwork required by GMP is addressed by making fake docs.
Samsung, Kyocera, and Micron are expanding their operations in Japan to make more chips there. It is unclear how many chip types. I know that Japan may be more expensive for manufacturing but much more reliable - they closely monitor and inspect everything being shipped into the country and clamp down on counterfeits much more effectively. Taiwan is also good but slightly more vulnerable to fakes.
Keep in mind that the people you order them from may have bought them from China first as well. The problem starts in China, where they sell old chips that have been sitting in a junkyard in the sun and humidity for years, and they sell them as if they are new and working. Book of Swindles 101 is what they are doing.
I bought a bunch of electronic components from Amazon. They're all garbage. Every single transistor aren't even close to their specs, Decade counters weren't firing correctly, optocouplers blowing up well below max limits.... Lesson learned. One of the sellers wanted to give me a refund if I remove the negative feedback I left on their product -- Hell NO...... Feedback stays there.
Another form of counterfeiting is to change the version numbers of an existing chip from a old and obsolete version to the current version. Often obsolete versions of a chip are available for pennies while a newer version might be worth orders of magnitude more. Just changing a few letters on a chip can greatly increase its value and the differences in functionality might be very subtle and hard to detect.
Same with ICs that have tolerance grades, eg get a IC thats worth 1$/pc at grade B/C whatever, relabel to grade A and sell at like 3$/pc or more. Its hardly even detectable by measuring, as often for example worse grade ICs will be within the tolerance of the better grade most of the time, so you would need a huge sample size to even detect it. Worse yet with ICs with different operating temperture ranges, as thats not detectable at all with measuring, but this specific example already was discussed in the video. So with these counterfeiting examples basically all you have to go by is how well the relabeling was actually done, if it was sloppy then it can be detected fairly easily, if its near perfect and measuring isnt viable either well then this is a very big challenge to detect.
The problem is Ebay, Wish, Amazon etc. ... they don't take responsibility for product quality or are able to enforce it. Sellers don't know what they're selling, just what it's believed to be. Buyer sees a Seller Rating but it's only about the online Transaction itself and the rating has very little to do with product quality.
I used to build analog modems. In the earlier days years they had lots of chips. We tested every Modem to its limits. If one chip or component was bad the unit was rejected sent to the lab to find out why. Sometimes Some of the chips were counter-fit. Its hard for me to understand A chip going into medical or aerospace not being tested.
I've heard that a big client for this 3rd-patry chip harvesting is a repair industry for _modern_ electronics. Many big companies (like Apple) will force their manufacturers into agreement that prohibits them from selling specific chips to anyone else. And when a chip like this dies, Apple isn't bothering to replace the chip itself, offering whole new motherboard instead, because why take $50 from their fan, when they can take $800. So when independent repairers try to enter the niche Apple won't take (economic repairs, data restoration etc.), their only supply is those counterfeit chips. This is an amusingly stable system: a company is multiplying e-waste by refusing to do precise repairs, but then adds an incentive to harvest that e-waste for parts that people who try to do precise repairs cannot aquire by legal means.
Ah, Apple ... I bought a new Macbook Air in 2012, the larger size. It lasted 8 months. I was very careful about it, and it just started failing in all kinds of random ways. I managed to sell it to a guy (who I think repairs or has a repair guy) for a few hundred $ before it became a doorstop. Of course I'd gone to the same Apple store where I'd bought it at the first signs of trouble and they said, "You don't have Applecare? We can't help you!". Now, the fluxes used on modern circuit boards are water-soluble and often "hygroscopic" which means they'll actually attract water out of the air. This is not a problem if the circuit boards are properly washed off after being soldered. But I have a theory they leave just a little bit on, don't wash the boards quite well enough, so they'll fail in a year or so and then if you didn't pay a few hundred for an Applecare plan, then they have a good chance you'll just a new laptop because you're married to the Apple ecosystem. Joke's on them, I got a few-years-old Windows machine that turned out to run circles around the new Apple for battery life, and never looked back. Used Dells are a great value.
I can understand counterfeit chips being in consumer products, but military systems?? I was under the impression that the whole supply chain for mil spec kit was heavily audited with traceability going right back to the fab (l guess one of the reasons mil spec costs so much). Thank you for the video, interesting and informative as ever.
The military situation is almost certainly a contractor that serviced an old assembly and the part required was out of production. They would then need to get authorization to purchase from gray channels. Nothing nefarious or unexpected here, just a good reminder that sufficient stock needs to be held of replacement parts on critical infrastructure, which is not something the government is good at doing.
They are usually injected to a normal market and you have almost no way to know. Fake chips are still common even with a good supliers, because there is always someone who is willing to make some extra money on doing something shady.
I mean if the lowest bidder is heavily audited then sure. But the WHOLE us military, at least, and probably others, is built on the basis of selecting the company who will do what they need for the lowest cost. It's done some bad things like the Camp Lejeune water thing
The depth of the detail on an already unique and at times obscure topic is always impressive. Many thanks for your work and commitment to keeping the masses who wanna stay informed aware of whats really going on!
You missed one. I've been a MCU test engineer for 40 years and have seen test move over seas. I suspect some of the parametric failures are sent to the black market despite the certificates of destruction. They will be functional but not meet spec indicating issues with processing or particulates. The life span of these devices cannot be determined.
As always, this channel kicks A's. One of the most underrated channels on TH-cam coming from someone in Taiwan but covers semiconductor of the whole globe in great depth and breadth. I am a technical professional that no longer an active combatant but I want to stay informed. All your videos are well researched and credible. Keep up the great work!
The flip side is that the recycling of obsolete chips keeps a lot of old hardware out of landfill. Lots of 1980s computer chips or sound chips are just unobtainable now without the reclaimed chip (aka NOS (we all know its not)) market. Yes, there is a problem with YM2149 being remarked as an AY-3-8910, which do essentially the same job, but the alternative is a whole load of machines being scrapped.
Hey! ur the dude that made the RC2014! wow. your product is the sole reason why i got into tinkering with older tech and low level programming. you are literally the reason i started college for computer science and debugging. I bought your kit YEARS ago when it first launched on tindie and I still have it on my shelf. I didnt know what i wanted to do with myself for the longest time. I was stuck at home playing minecraft with no passion for anything really for years until someone recommended me your kit. I was 18 at the time and im now 24 and about to graduate with a 4 year degree in comp sci thanks to you. Thank you Spencer.
What? No they are not recycling. They are making fakes by taking old stuff and ruining anything working completely. And then scrape off the information what it actually is and relabel it as new and something else then it might actually be. All of it is taking working or broken components and selling them as new whatever. Even if the component is not even working or close to what they are sold as. How is it recycling grinding and heating up stuff and making SURE it is ruined. And sold as something it actually is not. They are not carefully taking stuff off boards and claiming it as new. They do not even care if it works or what it is as long as it sells and looks like the real thing. Like that is the problem not donor parts witch is real recycling.
Reusing chips can be a good idea, but they NEED to be sold as such, and not as "new". A toy factory probably will not mind and will get recycled chips for cheaper. Same for some guy just trying to build his own synthesizer. However, pacemaker manufacturers or industries of that same general nature have an actual life-or-death need (of the product user, not the company itself) to be able to source brand new, completely to spec, and traceable parts. That last one is important. If something is ultimately causing danger to life and limb, you NEED to run word up the product chain to get them to both inform all others who bought a defective batch to recall those products, and to make sure the defect is fixed going forward. If there is no product chain to run up because nobody really knows or keeps track of where they come from, bad things keep happening.
And eBay, knowingly and willingly continues to allow sellers, both foreign and domestic (to the US) to blatantly sell (blatantly) counterfeit semiconductors to the American public, with whatever government rules, regulations, laws, and statutes have been passed having exactly zero effect in curbing this, since it continues unabated and has been present for as long as I can remember - certainly well over a decade.
There are a lot of schlock operators on Ebay but not all of us are. I don't sell something at NOS unless it really is NOS. I sell a lot of things as used even though I highly suspect they're NOS but can't conclusively prove it. I'm the quickest draw in town to issue a refund if parts turn out to not work for the customer. (It's not worth it quibbling over a $10 tube of chips anyway). And a lot of the stuff I sell has been in some university's parts room for many decades so I like to think I'm avoiding the fake chips problem by selling chips that are very old.
Settle down there, there's nothing illegal about selling gray market parts. If you want white channel parts you simply need to purchase from an authorized distributor and not a gray channel such as eBay. Regulation is NOT the solution here - the industry already has the solution and you're refusing to use it because you want to save yourself a few dollars and then whine about it.
@@knurlgnar24 Selling counterfeit items is very much illegal in the United States. Claiming that items that are used are actually fresh and new from the factory, is also illegal. Additionally, both violate eBay's TOS.
I'm amazed at the quality of work that goes in these videos. I work in electronics supply chain, and have been for a significant amount of time. The amounts of details that get covered on this channel is just unreal.
I've read of companies selling USB sticks marked as having many times exaggerated capacities. They pretend to bu the high capacity, but just wrap around and overwrite themselves when they reach the true capacity, which may not be detected until long after being bought.
Not only USB sticks, but also SD cards. And sometimes they don't even wrap around, just pretend that the files where written, while in reality only the metadata is stored.
I just got burned on 3 eBay semiconductor purchases: The first was for 2N5460 P-Channel J-FET transistors which are more rare than N-Channel and usually more expensive. These were perfectly laser-engraved with a Fairchild logo that was just an ‘F’ that was thinner than Fairchild’s normal logo. These turned out to be a mix of common bi-polar PNP and NPN transistors! The remaining 2 were for 2N6027/28 PUJTs that are really rare. In both cases I found offers for what seemed like legit-clones such as what a company like ON-Semi might reproduce with good quality. However, instead of PUJT’s, they were garden-variety SCR’s! So, I’ve pretty much quit buying semi’s from eBay since they have knowingly allowed this to go on for decades! China has been the ONLY country I’ve been burned by. When you call them on it, you get this “We so sorry-We just didn’t know. You Americans so smart-We give you refund right away”. So, the mostly do refund but what a hassle and it shakes your confidence!
Bleh! You should be able to report that seller to Ebay because Ebay takes fake goods very serioiusly - not because of electronic components so much as because of the problems they've run into (and Amazon also) with fake designer clothes and shoes and such things.
Report them to eBay. And test whatever you get against known good ones. Or at least ones that behave the way you need. There are some simple tests, like continuity between pins. It isn't valid for identifying, but you'll know when one is out of spec. As ironic as it may be, get a LCR-T4, and just double check that they read as the same component as the known good one. Chinese crap, to test Chinese crap. :) Mine seems pretty consistent. And I do the physical exam, to try to weed out crap. As I recall, the occasional counterfeits have made it to Digikey and Mouser, but they definitely want to keep their good reputation, so they're going to work as hard as possible to avoid counterfeits from going to customers. I'd trust them 99% for selling you good parts. eBay, I'd trust like 10%. Sure, I've bought some components from eBay, but that's because either I couldn't source it anywhere else, and/or I was going to be running it at a small fraction of it's capacity, so it didn't matter as long as it sort of worked. And I don't build anything for health or safety. No one will die when my projects release their magic smoke.
Yep, it's hard to find through hole RF transistors, so counterfeiters take advance of it. Try to find legitimate 2n5109 transistors, it's like trying to find hen's teeth.
One thing not mentioned in this video is reject parts being stamped with new markings. This is how it works: A semiconductor manufacturer of good repute such as ON Semi will make a production run of transistors. As they are coming off the line, they will be subjected to various tests. The ones which fail these tests get rejected and go into a large bin. Now, it might be that the transistor works perfectly fine, it just didn't meet some specific threshold for testing. None of these reject parts will get to the stage of having markings stamped on them - they are side-lined before they reach that part of the production line. What you have now is a large bin full of transistors with no markings. These will get sold as rejects - and the buyer won't have any idea exactly what device they are. Let's say they were actually 2N3055 transistors, a common switching/amplification device. China will come along, buy up all these rejects then stamp them with the markings for a rare and expensive transistor that might have ratings way in excess of what the 2N3055 does. We as the consumer buy them, thinking we have got a bargain on an otherwise rare and hard to get device - only to have them go BANG the instant the machine into which they are fitted is turned on. Or, in some instances they may work for a while, until they fail because they're actually being used in an application that runs them outside of their real parameters.
Part of working with a new power plant company, I, along with many other contractors, had to watch a lecture on counterfeit parts. They covered some electronics and chips but also mentioned things like valves, motors, fans, and other industrial equipment. You can see the problem when you are working with parts that cost $1 million, and the supplier gets a knockoff to make a few hundred thousand extra dollars.
In the analogue synthesiser scene, we need CA3080s, Ua726s, MAT-02s, and LM394s often. Most of the DIY guys just won't even buy from anyone that looks Chinese because of this problem. Thanks for making a video about it.
When one of your products has a part that's gone EOL (end-of-life), and you missed the LTB (last time buy) memo, and some parts broker says they have 50 reels of them... maybe the parts are authentic, maybe they were acquired legitimately 10 years ago from some company that no longer used them, and the broker has been sitting on them. Your options might be really limited. Anritsu is still selling the test equipment I worked on as an engineer 20 years ago (with many upgrades since then), and some of the circuit designs came straight from the Wiltron 360B, which was designed in the 1980's.
Wonder if it will be a viable business to place large orders whenever there is a LTB notice for chips and hang on to them for a while and later sell them at double or higher prices....... hummmm
@@someb0dy2 Some companies have tried this in the past and lost their shirts so to speak. Quite risky to try to guess what chips will be valuable in the future.
Well, in that case, what I do is to request a small sample and then I'll thoroughly test them. But I can do that, because the company I work for makes stuff in small batches (200 - 1000/year) and if we buy whole reel, we can be good for another two or three years.
i can't believe even Boeing and the Army got fake chips,i thought it would be just on a hobby level, I've had my suspicions that i got fake stuff on ebay because the circuits i built would work intermittently or work at first and then not work, which is very frustrating because of the hours spent troubleshooting after building and not thinking the chips are at fault, rather blaming myself. even though ive built plenty of circuits successfully. really frustrating.
Yeah that's one thing you'd realize after a while. As a hobbyist you'd think that the cheapest would do but in reality, a fake/bad part will waste hours on troubleshooting and make you frustrated to the point of burn out. The alternative is to thoroughly test the part but that's an additional investment of time and every part may be different even if the label says otherwise.
This is great video and I shared it on a PCM hacking/tuning forum I'm on as we deal with this all the time. Clones in older ECU tuning supplies out number genuine. Many of the clones straight up don't work or fail quickly which is completely unacceptable in a critical application as a car ECU or similar module. Some of the members went to extreme lengths to secure a supply of genuine EEPROMs, NVRAM and those exact FTDI ICs in the thumbnail for example. Even genuine automotive parts that contain semiconductors that are manufactured in China often fail easily compared to the Mexican ones. 6 months opposed to 20-30 years typically seen with the AC Delco parts, which are now made in China by Delphi.
5:43 no. their situation is NOT understandable" these suppliers are paid immense premium for those parts with the understanding of how rare they are and the expected posts and efforts that are needed to test and verify them all. these low quality counterfeits are able to slip by because the suppliers are cutting corners due to greed so the right way to dissuade this from continuing to happen is to slap them with penalties that will wipe away any fraudulent revenue that they have made and remove the incentive of it happening in the first place. maybe even slap prison terms on top of everything.
When one of your products has a part that's gone EOL (end-of-life), and you missed the LTB (last time buy) memo, and some parts broker says they have 50 reels of them... maybe the parts are authentic, maybe they were acquired legitimately 10 years ago from some company that no longer used them, and the broker has been sitting on them. Your options might be really limited. And, if they're fake, what are you going to do? Sue China?
This is a huge, long running problem! I remember fixing an audio amplifier 10+ years ago. I replaced the main output transistors but the new ones kept blowing up. They did not meet the specs from the datasheet. I eventually cut open one of the old and one of the new transistors. The die of the new transistors was much smaller. I was confused at the time but eventually learned the new transistors were fake parts.
Very true, especially for highly sought after items, such as long out of production Toshiba transistor. Finding a replacement parts for older hifi amp can be a periluous journey.
@@jojoanggono3229 Don't even get my started on the Sanyo STK hybrid amp ICs... 80% of the ones available to buy are fake and will blow up either immediately or shortly after you've buttoned the device back up... which is especially annoying because you can't really substitute them with anything else
Speaking as an engineer, this is the most complete documentation of the problem of counterfeit semiconductor modules. Bravo to the team of Asionometry for the great effort they put into this presentation.
@@Gameboygenius You mean when I speak to myself and my soul I am speaking to the same person? I was living a lie all of my life! (Just some fun for the moment). Thanks Gameboygenius, I didn't notice it. Happy Sunday evening by the way.
@@christopherneufelt8971 What...? What I'm saying is that Asianometry is run by a team of one, a person by the name of Jon Y. Maybe a team of two if you count Jon Y and Jon Y's soul as different people.
I already experienced fake chips problem in my work trying to debug electronic circuit and it always worked unstable in final product, but worked well on the table
We had some fake Xilinx CPLDs back in ~2009 building components for the ALMA telescope. The failure mode was so subtle, it is a miracle we detected it. I don't remember how they were acquired but I think it was from a broker after the part had been EOL'd.
I bought some LM317 a few years ago. The price was good but not too good to be true. The first one wouldn't work. The second one smoked as soon as power was applied. I contacted my supplier and they asked me to send them all back. They sent me replacements and these all worked and they confirmed that they had received a batch of verified counterfeits and were profusely sorry for the trouble. They absolutely stood up and took care of the problem and wound up paying me more in discounts than the original parts cost me. I never would have thought something as simple and ubiquitous as an LM317 would be so problematic.
Yes, even low-end IC`s can be counterfeit. I had a similar incident with LM317 IC`s. I ordered the TO-220 style variant (1amp power rating) but on testing the maximum output was 100mA. Upon inspection it was discovered the chip inside was for the TO-92 (100mA) version of the LM317.
I've heard there are counterfeit M92 power management ICs for the Nintendo Switch being widely sold to electronics repair technicians. People will buy a pack of chips, replace the faulty one on the board with the "new" one they bought and it doesn't work. They give it to someone else to figure out, that person has real M92 chips, they replace it, and it works. it's scary how common that is for those.
One of the most common counterfeit methods is selling parts that didn't pass testing as either good parts or as lower grade parts. Often times on a reel of parts you'll get obvious failures such as missing dies, no leadframes, etc. When a packaging house is making 10 million parts a year at 9x% yield that's a whole lot of scrap parts that can be sold into the gray market if someone at the packaging house has an in with someone who handles that material.
I've bought a lot of chips off ebay and resellers that've ended up being fakes. Bit of rubbing alcohol on top and some fast and furious rubbing with a ear-bud cleaner and you can frequently see it. I suppose skimmed and non-painted but laser etched would be harder to detect. Also I've had one that when I stuck it in a system instantly blew all the buffering caps surrounding the IC. Strongly suspect it was not functionally what was re-marked.
Hits close to home. Those of us who have a hobby in old electronics have run into this at least once. There are, however, several good videos from folks on YT showing some of the physical methods of detecting fakes. No one likes to loose a whole machine by putting a fake in circuit with good chips, so physical is best.
I remember the 2015 FTDI 232RL serial chip clone problem. In fact the clone was better manufactured tham the original, but if it was detected by the windows driver, it blocked it from working and disabled it.
I purchased a Thermistor interface PCB for a product I was prototyping. When I tested the prototype, it kept reporting the wrong temperature. It turns out the MAX31855 IC on is was a counterfeit and it had a design bug (it was a defective copy). I ended up purchasing a PCB from a trusted source (AdaFruit) to see if that would resolve the issue and it did. This cost me a lot of time. Comparing the ICs, there was nothing visually different between the two. The only way to know the fist one was a counterfeit was the error - or requiring part source tracking which is difficult to get, especially when you are in a parts shortage situation. I an sure I am not the only one to run into this.
I imagine testing costs are going to rise, and get passed onto the consumer. Essentially one group (counterfeiters) are stealing from another group (innocent consumers).
@@brodriguez11000 Yes, that is how things work. Someone has to cover the costs of making the product. As he mentioned, the problem is also driven by how quickly technology is changing. This is especially a problem in Military and Medical devices which have to be requalified if you change them so there is a lot of incentive to not change them. Both of those require vendors to provide record that "prove" that but that proof can be counterfeited (which he also mentioned). Sometimes that happens insincerely but sometimes it is because they are because they have to take what they can get and trust that it is correct of not supply product and go out of business. It is a Hobson's Choice.
End-of-lifes doesn't force a company to go second hand. The company can choose to proactively modernize a design. This is expensive but avoids shady broker components. Also, safety critical subsystems should be end-of-line functional tested, I'm surprised the aviation sector isn't comprehensively doing that.
A note to those that may think this doesn't concern them: There are old CPUs being relabeled and sold as new and more expensive ones (for example, an old Athlon sold as a new Ryzen CPU), sometimes they even replace the whole IHS, and there are even counterfeit GPUs with fake firmware flashed so it shows as legitimate in the OS (untill you try to install a driver or actually use it). Stay vigilant when buying second hand!
Other examples: - During the mid 2000 there was a huge batch of counterfeit Athlon XP that were in fact rebranded Geode chips, performing similarly but requiring higher voltages. The story was revealed several years after the incident and it impacted a massive amount of customers around Europe. - With the rise of Arduino, a lot of cloned AVR chips (and later STM32) entered the market at very low prices. Sometimes correctly described as pinout or code compatible, sometimes totally counterfeit relabeling. Even for the genuine replacement clones, analog circuits and tolerances are often poor and characteristics like voltages, fuses, ISP or watchdog don't match the original specs.
Great video, well put together. I'm hoping that no one is deluded enough to think counterfeiters make any attempt to "manufacturer" an actual product. Ideally, the component or product is imaginary. Counterfeiters exploit greed and processes or people they know. They don't have a creed or any moral code with regards to the consequences of their actions.
Almost any semiconductor on Aliexpress is nearly guaranteed to be fake, from generic components like MOSFETs, opamps, etc., to STM32 microcontrollers and other complex chips.
Shaved ICs were a problem back in the 1990s when I worked in contract electronics manufacturing Real concern is one where the take a 5 watt ic and mark it 50 watt, it will work in test and for short time real word, but will fail allot faster
Hang on, if the buyers bought direct from the original manufacturer or their authorised supply chain, this could not happen. The problem is buying from the cheapest supplier. I can buy from a Toyota dealer or pay half the price and buy my car parts from eBay. The latter is cheaper but I don't expect genuine parts.
What happens often is that when an IC manufacture discontinues the item, a third party supplier will buy up all the inventory and then re-sell them. The original manufacturer no longer support, sell or warehouse them for distribution.
Well that is very true. The problem in developed countries is there is at least a 10 times markup on basic components when you buy from a quality supplier. And even if you search for a cheap supplier you end up paying a 3 times markup. In underdeveloped countries you only pay 25% to at most double the mass manufacturer wholesale cost.
Over the last few years the problem is authorized sellers are out of stock and manufacturers have lead times over a year. I don't think it's about the cost of the chips themselves. It's about companies trying to get enough supply to keep production going.
@@BrianMarshall1 Trying to do low volume low cost in Europe is nearly impossible due to the 10x component markup. Gluing together low cost imported modules is one answer.
issue is not only with counterfeit chips, often scraped chips that does not pass QA will be sold as "good" ones, and there is no way to know until it just fail in manufacturer approved scenario
So it is not engineers who decide that chip layouts should flip around or get remapped by 1 pin, its a fake chip. That makes so much sense I always wondered why some chips got slightly altered and look the same.
I personally try to reuse components off of dead equipment. Often times, a systemic failure cannot be traced, but most components can be verified as working. I really believe that we need more reuse of electronics components, if they are marked as used.🥰
I bought an FPGA chip a long time ago that was marketed as being desoldered and reballed from old equipment. It was for a repair and worked fine. YMMV...
It is nothing like Louis Vuitton, premium bag doesn't have any performance improvements over cheap ones :) How much weight you can carry in premium bag?
I don't know about y'all But an old pile of beige computer boxes have me totally intrigued The thought of old components for my childhood hit me with a fresh bout of nostalgia
There are people who collect old chips like collecting coins or stamps. Some early consumer electronics had some really expensive ICs in there with lots of gold. Early fax machines are one instance I remember.
there is also the issue of manufacturers that wont sell spares to 3rd party repair companies, even if the chip is a generic one as companies using the chips have agreements with the manufacturer to not sell to anyone else but them. else why are so many fully functional devices that could be repair easily end up as e waste an example is macbooks, most have texas instrument ic but because apple and texas instruments have an agreement to not sell to anyone other than apply, the spares are near impossible to get unless you harvest it from dead equipment which is 50/50 chance of it being fake. my workplace IT department has a shelf of dead macbooks because of a simple chip dying and apples repair costs the same price as an entire new device, most arent even 2 years old. Same can be said for John Deere tractors, alot of manufacturers dont sell spares for out of warranty equipment and even if they do you cant have your own maintenance teams do it, you have to wait for their technicians which can cause 1-2 weeks downtime.
I love it when companies say other products cost them money. Its not a cost, they feel entitled to profits they didn’t earn. If they cant compete or root out counterfeits they cant complain.
There's been a trend going around my country where, people take old power bank chips and old feature phone batteries and stick it in a case to make new and very harmful power banks or lights. These are sold on the flee markets and may explode if used
the chipset market now looks like the oil market. when the United States invaded Iraq. Even though Iraq is only responsible for 4% of the world's oil market, prices have immediately doubled. even though only 4% of the world's oil supply disappeared from the market
in some cases, when attempting to make a "clone" product, the company will look at the spec sheets and replicate everything in there. It's interesting sometimes, as it results in bugs from the original design being fixed, or quirks from the spec sheet being inaccurate being patched. For example, there are some addressable RGB LEDs that the "clone" is actually better than the original, as the LEDs they used are brighter, but able to fit in a smaller package, and fix some problems that make the difference between "I'm done talking to this LED" and "here's the data for the next one" MUCH more clear. Many software libraries have implemented modes for it, as it's often sold labeled as the original because it's cheaper and on paper works the same. Finding someone selling it directly is shockingly difficult, as at best, their listing has both names in it. So the best bet is buying the smaller kind, since the original doesn't have the smaller size.
In the section of old parts you used a rather poor example at 5:48 :the 65c816 is still made. the 14mhz WDC 65c816 is 100% drop in compatible with the 4Mhz VLSI part shown
It doesn't matter if components are still made. It only matters if someone is buying them. If there's money to be made the counterfeiters will get involved.
@@1pcfred In the section where he was showing the 65c816 he was explaining about old parts not being made anymore, forcing buyers to look outside regular channels. off all (stock) images of chips he choice exactly one of the very few that is still being produced 37 years after introduction.
@@rj7855 there are plenty of old parts that are out of production today. I'm sure someday the part shown in the video will become obsolete too. Someone will still need one to keep old gear running though.
There's no chip to cheap to counterfeit either. Even just on the low volume/hobbyist side, low cost opamps like the OPA2134 are re-etched NE5532s and the ubiquitous LM317 has been relabeled as a variety of just marginally more expensive regulators. Which is frustrating when you chose something specifically for its ability to handle more that 1.5 amps. Of course theres the hoards of out-of-spec transistors, worth only tens of cents each, which also aren't thrilling to discover.
Thanks for all the great videos! Is that an AI generated image of what's supposed to be e-waste at 7:23? It sure looks like it is - that's a fever dream of non-discernible e-waste looking stuff! What's funny is that in a video about fake chips you've got a fake picture of old computers! Haha!
None of the images are AI generated... There are tells for AI images that you pick up if you've ever done anything with image manipulation or AF. The people that can't tell are the people that have never used these systems. You sir, are the latter.
Counterfeit chips! What next? Incidentally, have a look at latest high-end fake Rolex watches. Some of them are remarkably good, and require expert investigation to tell apart from the genuine articles. Interestingly, they cost a fraction of the price of genuine Rolexes, which gives some insight to the likely build cost of Rolex watches, revealing that their margins must be very large indeed. Perhaps a story for Asianometry? Your channel is very absorbing.
@F L Lookalikes, quartz circuitry? You don't know much about rolex clone. Here a video to update your knowlegde th-cam.com/video/NVI3uchlto8/w-d-xo.html
@F L Not so! The mechanical movements are visually extremely similar to OEM. The difference lies in the regulator assembly. Rolex uses a particular centrifugal mass adjustment arrangement on the balance wheel. Thus far not replicated. Look it up. Be amazed.
Ironically, the brand cache of rolex is so high that you pay a brand tax even on the fakes. There are better Chinese watches for less money. If anything the fakes actually help advertise real Rolex.
@El Gatto I agree with the first part, but all these excellent fakes hurt rolex. They want their watches to be worn by the legitimately rich and successful, not those who would pretend to be so. It eeminds me of mercedes, who, when they started making wagons, were worried that they might be seen carrying ladders and cans of paint.
@@yuglesstube Not really. Rolex is a brand carried mostly by hype. Wearing a fake still spreads the name around. And, frankly, they sell out of almost everything they make. Also even though they're luxury now, back in the day they were designed to be tough, and movement iterations since carry on that defunct legacy.
Last year when I was first getting into electronics and arduino, I bought a bag of 50 NAND chips off amazon. After trying many times to get them to work, switching the chip out multiple times in case I had ruined it I finally gave up. I assumed I was wiring it wrong. Ever since I have just made NAND gates manually out of transistors, and now this video has me wondering If I didn't order a bag of fake chips. They were suspiciously cheap but I just thought that was because they are mass produced.
I am an EE with 50 years experience. I do not believe the story of Chinese counterfeit chips for anything but the most trivial types of silicon. The story of the XILINX FPGA fallen out of its socket (it was a PGA) indicates, that when the dies were bonded inside the ceramic housing, they used pins with a smaller diameter. In fact it is even more likely that the socket was incorrect. When these sockets are new, the PGA chip is very difficult to insert (lots of pressure is required) It is considerable easier to remove the chip and when you do insert and extract the chip a few times, the insertion forces is only a fraction of the force required the first time. Here is my reason, I do not believe that any chip as complex as a FPGA can be reverse engineered in an economical manner. You cannot re-design a microchip based on a look at the exposed die. You have to study its functionality and then more or less engineer it from scratch while being very careful to attain the same specs. Also a FPGA is configured at power up from a separate Flash memory. The bit-stream is encrypted and a closely guarded secret of Xilinx. This protects the user, so reading the bitstream does not allow a thief to regenerate the schematics or HDL code. However it is possible that the Chinese managed to "unhack" the encryption. But then, why? All the chips they "copy" are old and the market for them is very limited and little money can be made that way. Here is what I believe is the real story of what is going on. China bullies any company who wants to do business in China to provide "technology transfer". This means Xilinx was "arm-twisted" to provide their Chinese partners in the Joint Venture to provide the design files for older chips. Xilinx desided to go along with that idea, since they are one of the most innovative companies on the planet. Anything 10 years old is of no interest to them. Besides China just does not have the semiconductor technology to "fab" the most advanced chips. Xilinx manufactures in Taiwan at TSMC. Espionage is another explanation but I do not think so. The shame is on the defense contractor. Apparently their military technology is decades old and the chips are no longer made by Xilinx. The chip in the video was a XC3090... probably 30 years old. It is not available for at least 20 years and when you buy one it is "new" but "old stock".
Note however that the video is discussing counterfeit chips from a wider perspective than die cloning. Recycled chips could also be considered counterfeit if they are if unknown source and not properly valudated. Such chips can have any number of problems like remarked to fake specs, pin corrosion, random ESD or other damage that's causing the chip to go out of tolerance. In a perfect world, a specialty broker would stockpile chips at EOL and sell them long term to military and similar customers. Of course, the market is too lucrative for those honest brokers to be the only players around.
Most of the chip manufacturers have a big disclaimer statement at the end of the datasheet stating that they should not be used in any product that can cause harm or death to human beings should they fail. If you choose to do so you need to request approval from the manufacturer and they will decide if they want to endorse the device or not.
When a business buys parts that can cause harm or death due to failure, the manufacturer puts this thru certificate of compliance "CofC" traceability from date of manufacturing, through distribution and to final customer. It guarantees you get the right part and that it works BUT tends to drive the price way up. Bad part is now some are faking the CofC as well. Get caught doing that = big time jail sentence.
A company I used to work for was dealing with significant problems of determining counterfeits from non counterfeits back in 2018 because we were dealing with a chip shortage when one of our largest suppliers discontinued our most commonly used chip, with essentially no prior notice to the company and no replacement targeted. It'd have set back company production by 12-24 months to redesign every board to use a different chip and test the new design to make sure it functioned identically to the old design, so the company had to buy leftover chips from basically every place they could buy them internationally. It became a huge effort of figuring out what was legitimate stock and what was counterfeit. I had started a position at a different company before I got to find out how that all ended.
Fake chips were absolutely everywhere during the 386/486 days of PC clones. Being a retailer back then, here in Australia I'd say 99% of all very cheep no-name 386/486 PC clones had non-functioning cache and other chips on their motherboards. The emergence of 'name brand' boards and cards really saw our market change for the better.
I’m not sure the Louis Vuitton analogy was the best… counterfeit bags still work as intended, and considering the huge profit margins of “luxury” brands, they might even be higher quality.
🤔 No doubt counterfeit parts can't just be swept under the rug, but it's still an interesting point about the craftsmanship involved in counterfeiting. 😮 ~ repliesgpt
Its like paying $1000 for a brand name or paying $10 for a copy that does the same job ! It happens in everything in life NOT just electronic chips !!!
Danny, tell me about your feelings after pondering on this: - Paying $1000 for a Hi-Fi prostitute or paying $10 for a back door train station prostitute. They do the same job. ??? ;)
@@chefnyc yep the fake chips have often less tolerance or less characteristics when they aren't simply partially defective dies or relabeled chips from lower skus.
Thanks for watching and glad you found it so informative 🙌 Glad I could help and hope you keep watching for more interesting tech topics 🤖 ~ repliesgpt
its pretty ok, but people who completely relies on these vids instead of doing at least some of their own study are bound to be misled which are majority of people
A couple of years ago we saw excessive failure of a diode used in one of our products. Our bill of materials called out a diode with part number manufactured by Fairchild (a US company). We asked our Chinese contract manufacturer for a picture of the reels that contains the diodes. The reels had a label showing the correct part number and manufacturer. We asked them to ship us a reel and we sent it to Fairchild for analysis. Fairchild x-rayed the diode and told us it is not a Fairchild part.
Hello there! I'm curious, do you have a team working with you to make these videos or do you make these all yourself? The amount of research required for these videos must be incredible. Thanks for the interesting videos!!
Some times the scam is simply printing fake 128 meg labels on four meg memory chips. My son who has mental health problems saw a huge difference between in store prices and on line products. Not having the wisdom to be suspicious at his young age tried to buy these and sell them at the local flea market. Being an honest man the following week he returned everyines money. Only a teen he learned a valuable lesson about buying anything Chinese
Lol, I buy a lot of fpga boards from aliexpress that are lower priced than the fpga themselves. I dont want to know the truth, the lie makes me happier.
I love harvested chips that cover places I can't buy anymore because surface mount is now so ubiquitous and a lot of the old designs I populate are THT. So these chips are not fake unless they are sold as new.
The components are counterfeit (fake) if they purposely sell you a remarked part that is not the part that it is supposed to be. Even changing the lot or date on the component is an act of counterfeiting. Many of the chinese counterfeit parts are harvested, cleaned up, blacktopped and remarked to be a better and/or newer version of what it was originally. That purposeful misrepresentation of the part fits the definition of counterfeit. I might actually trust the chinese if they advertised and sold them truthfully. List them as used (or reclaimed or whatever) and leave the original markings alone. But now they simply find something with the same pin count - blacktop it and sell it as whatever is selling that day. Continuing to buy the counterfeit parts only emboldens the criminals to sell more fakes which will continue to get worse as time goes on.
This sounds petty compared to the severity of the story being told here, but this is an issue for vintage tech fixers and refurbishers. The commodore sid chip and other vintage CPUs are faked quite often. especially for hard to find parts. you think you bought from an old lot of 1802 cpus from ali expres, thinking they were pulled working from some old e-waste, when they were actually just some random chip with the same packaging, scrubbed and laser etched with the old logo. :/
6:50 sounds almost what I did in the 90's except I did it in the oven at my dorm as a poor student who just wanted to get the chips from PC motherboards. Oven heated to max, motherboard in and after awhile take out, flip upside down and gently bang it to something hard and almost all the chips and connectors would fall off. I think I still have some of the ISA-connectors somewhere.
However, some venerable parts have had legit die redesigns over their lifetimes. 555 timer, 7400 series logic, etc. Some of these have been in the industry for 40-50 years. Specs, pinout, etc. exactly the same.. only rather than it being on an 8-pin DIP, its an 8-tab TSSOP that can fit on your pinky-nail.
We use fake chips for military equipment because original manufacturer no longer makes them. They often fail on low temperatures and need to be replaced. Sometimes the whole batch appears to be faulty. Redesigning the circuitry for new type of ICs is next to impossible.
It's massive unfortunately. Especially now with the average person able to easily obtain silk screen, laser etching, etc. equipment cheaply. You even need to be careful using "pulls" and referbs. I think the USA should start making their own chips for mission critical applications, no matter the cost.
I'd say not so much because mass market parts are bought direct from the manufacturer in a supply contract so there are few middlemen to introduce fake parts. It's more of a problem at the retail components level, where intermediate stockists may buy the parts from multiple suppliers, and retail supplies are often erratic these days because contract customers are taking all the supply so we have to hunt around for parts for small-scale production, maintenance, R&D etc.
Yes it does. Guitar pedal builders have run into the issue of fake chips and other parts that don't operate as intended. Guitar pedals are mostly "inexpensive" consumer electronics that cost upwards of a couple hundred dollars each on avg.
@J C is correct about the guitar pedal problem. Op amps that have the same pinout as each other will do amplification, but the lower quality fakes often produce more noise, higher distortion or otherwise don't actually function as what they're labeled as.
Will just thinking about how crap a lot of tech from the USA is it’s a pity how some of this has happened the part that got me thinking is how bad the cars are from the USA
Had a prior incident with the foundry I worked with. Basically they produced non conforming products but still functional. Instead of scrapping them, they smuggled and sold the sub-standard product into the market. Someone bought them and have them properly packaged and marked as new. We only found out when the market price of our components kept eroding until it fell below our cost. Then we knew something was wrong.
In China nothing is thrown away. Whatever a foundry makes everything will be sold. Even scrap will go out the back door to those who will just use the package shape to create visual clones for selling on Ebay. Eight pin DIL is an op amp no matter what is inside.
@@mbak7801 I believe you 100% on this. It's a cutthroat market.
@@jacobp.2024 by the end of the day, there's no free lunch, if it's cheaper, then something is wrong.
You get what you paid for.
Except when you though you bought an original one for the price of the original. Then that's cheating and should be punished.
This will eventually ends as the trade war keeps escalating and production comes back to the US.
Foundry name? I will assume its not one of the big guys like TSMC, Samsung etc.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the counterfeit capacitor problem that has plagued electronics for the past 15 years. I've had half a dozen video card, motherboards, PSUs and LCD screens fail due to this issue. By far the biggest example of counterfeit components in terms of economic damage done as a result.
Indeed, most counterfeit capacitors can be indentified just from the plastic jacket printing, the lettering has soft edge, ink density is not uniform, and is not shiny like original items. Now I only source components from reputable distributors with Country of Origin document.
You're buying components from god awful vendors if fake caps are killing your computer components and monitors. Competent vendors know where their components are coming from. Are you buying the cheapest stuff available?
In the early to mid 2000s, that was actually from a legit manufacturer stealing the formula from another legit manufacturer but flubbed it - and those caps found their way into computers from Dell, Apple, etc. So something doesn't even need to be fake. Not sure what the deal is now, but no doubt it's definitely more the fakey stuff.
@@aluisious
The big names (IBM, Dell, etc.) were affected by fake caps.
It's relatively easy to test capacitors for leakage.
Around ten years ago in Shenzhen some few of the “somewhat” more “honest” electronics supply shops said “do you want the real one or the cheap one”. A huge quagmire that is beyond comprehension.
And hopefully you did indeed get a better (original) part instead of paying more and getting the same garbage.
@@ohger1 Hopefully he dealt with a different seller. If you are willing to dupe your customers, EVER, you don't get my business.
@@nobodynoone2500 Sometimes the vendor thinks he's getting A goods, and *he* gets a counterfeit and sells it in good faith. I remember a problem many years ago with Pratt and Whitney getting counterfeit parts for their jet engines!
@@ohger1 the same tends to occur in spare parts for cars.
@@ricardobritoruiz3279 it's really easy to spot those, the (as they're called) "service grade" parts are usually of horrible inferior quality. some outright are unacceptable for service outside the box to a skilled mechanic. some brand they sell are literally garbage in a box, which I've always contended was AutoZone's business model
This is a huge issue in retro computing these days. Many times people getting replacement chips for retro hardware will over buy what they need from the limited sources because the counterfeit rate can be as bad as 1 in 3 with the fakes being so poor they don't work at all or have completely different pinouts. It's so weird too because some of the fakes go out of their way to look cosmetically correct to the point they are spending a significant amount of time and money on the process of cleaning and relazering part numbers that you have to wonder why those resources weren't just spent in proper testing and authentication of the chips in the first place.
That's actually a really good point; the cost of making those retro chips with modern tech is so low compared to the shipping and selling that they might as well make it work.
@@joshuahudson2170 One issue with using modern replacements is that hardly any foundries produce 5v parts anymore, as 3v parts are the norm. If you want retro boards to work correctly with "modern" components, you need extra buffers to handle the voltage conversion. This greatly complicates the design, packaging, and price of modern replacements, and with extra buffers in place, achieving compatible timing is also quite hard.
I'm amazed at what's possible with modern FPGAs, but making new retro parts can still be pretty damn hard and expensive.
That's not an issue, that's what makes that hobby even approachable, if there were no counterfeits you would be paying 100 times the price for the original chip.
Yup, with the Atari 8 bit people have been making modern equivalent to the Pokey sound chip, same with old arcade systems. As well with the C64 and the SID chip and a few other chips and other systems.
I ran into exactly this when buying cache memory chips (SRAM) for my 486 motherboards. The chips were very obviously (read: poorly) sanded, blacktopped and re-lasered to some ludicrously low timings (10ns, when 15 was considered fast and 20 was the norm). A lot of them worked, but not all of them, so I was more or less forced to order more and just went all out and ordered 3 times the amount I actually needed just to get enough working ones and maybe a few to spare, and even with this nonsensical "solution" to my problem of even getting the chips from anywhere these days, they *still* ended up far cheaper than buying real ones locally (chinese relabels were about 12eur per 10 chips, a bit less if buying in larger quantities. Buying known-real NOS ones from local sellers would've cost between 10-20eur. PER CHIP)
I'm a little surprised that you didn't mention the time when FTDI pushed a driver update that bricked counterfeit FT232RL chips.
I am never using any FTDI product, real or counterfeit, for what the did.
Their controversial action broke finished products that were shipped to actual end users, too, without any available solution to fix a now completely bricked device.
Their chips are unreasonably expensive, too. I prefer a CH340G and other WCH products instead of any FTDI chip.
I've bought a bunch of LM358s from China. I wasn't worried about counterfeiting, because who would fake the most bottom end chip in use. Well, they did. Apparently there was an excessive demand for these parts, and they remarked a superior performing chip type, as a the inferior one, to fill the that transient need.
Not only lm358, but also tl07x, ne553x, lm741, rc4558, all of them low cost parts and even so faked.
@@CBtronica pennies add up to dollars.
We have bought some very cheap stuff, but they did not work. Reason: they were not chips but tiny plastic boxes with legs. There were nothing inside the bodies.
@aRGee rail to rail would be a remarkable achievement for a semiconducting device.
@@1pcfred No, it's a very common spec for op amps which is what @aRGee was talking about. If you search for "op amp" on Digikey it returns 30,908 results; filtering on "rail to rail" yields 14,489 so almost half.
TI has a white paper if you are interested: www.ti.com/lit/an/sloa039a/sloa039a.pdf
The foundry building some extras to sell out the back door is such an old-school scam, even if it's being done on hi tech products. I am reminded of how when Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, millers were considered the go to scumbag profession like used car salesmen today. Consequently, the Miller's Tale section of Canterbury Tales is the hilariously crass section.
A thousand years ago, the scam was that you'd bring your bag of 50 pounds of wheat to the miller and pay to have it milled, and he'd give you a 25 pound bag of flour. Your wheat supposedly was "all chaff" that got milled out. Or maybe a little bit was still stuck in the stone grinding wheel. Whatever, he had *totally* given you a fair deal.
Then that night, he'd bake bread for his own dinner with the extra flour you paid him to grind that whoopsie "got stuck in the machine." You know, just like we "whoopsie" had some chips left over after some yield issues resulted in some chips getting stuck in the machine.
That is competition and if you are opposed to it you are a socialist
I suppose it's an example of "there's nothing new under the sun".
Haha this scam still plays out in some parts of world. Usually the millers sell that flour in black market where I am from.
You can do the same thing if you have a weed grinder at a festival and someone needs to use it! Empty the bottom, put their weed in, grind it and give them then ground stuff, but little bits remain in the teeth and you can usually get a spliff out of it. Seems fair, since you let them use the grinder :D
😂😂 Ah, the age-old art of the scam going strong, it seems! 💀
~ repliesgpt
A dozen years ago I worked for a company that made power modules that were used on commercial airplanes. One day things went crazy as we got a report of one of them causing smoke in a airplane. Our engineer flew out immediately to look at it. They eventually figured out that the main transformer on some of the modules was a cheap counterfeit not within spec. And our supplier had no lot control so there was no way to track which ones were bad. So I spent a summer getting shipments of these things 30-50 at a time and replacing the main transformer on each one. Roughly 66% of them were fine and probably had good parts but we changed them anyway because we couldn't be sure. The other 33% showed obvious heat damage. Some of those boards were completely charred. Those we did a full board replacement.
Who paid for that 😳
@@NathanCroucher Our board supplier messed up so they got stuck with the bill.
If you look at the transformers used in some cheap cell phone chargers you will not sleep with one plugged in. DiodeGoneWild has some teardown videos of these.
"the companies owner died before sentencing" harsh business selling fakes to the military ^^
This has been a huge issue in my industry. We are trying to buy chips ANYWHERE but China as a result. They are just too corrupt for any certification to mean anything. It's mildly terrifying.
Same..... 😠😠😠
I like how you put it so nicely. That goes for all the regulated industries which live on certifications. I am from the pharmaceutical industry and sees first hand how all the paperwork required by GMP is addressed by making fake docs.
Certification and statements of compliance are more faked than the product itself
Samsung, Kyocera, and Micron are expanding their operations in Japan to make more chips there. It is unclear how many chip types. I know that Japan may be more expensive for manufacturing but much more reliable - they closely monitor and inspect everything being shipped into the country and clamp down on counterfeits much more effectively. Taiwan is also good but slightly more vulnerable to fakes.
Keep in mind that the people you order them from may have bought them from China first as well. The problem starts in China, where they sell old chips that have been sitting in a junkyard in the sun and humidity for years, and they sell them as if they are new and working. Book of Swindles 101 is what they are doing.
I bought a bunch of electronic components from Amazon. They're all garbage. Every single transistor aren't even close to their specs, Decade counters weren't firing correctly, optocouplers blowing up well below max limits.... Lesson learned. One of the sellers wanted to give me a refund if I remove the negative feedback I left on their product -- Hell NO...... Feedback stays there.
Hell no that's what I say when people want good feedback
Another form of counterfeiting is to change the version numbers of an existing chip from a old and obsolete version to the current version. Often obsolete versions of a chip are available for pennies while a newer version might be worth orders of magnitude more. Just changing a few letters on a chip can greatly increase its value and the differences in functionality might be very subtle and hard to detect.
Same with ICs that have tolerance grades, eg get a IC thats worth 1$/pc at grade B/C whatever, relabel to grade A and sell at like 3$/pc or more.
Its hardly even detectable by measuring, as often for example worse grade ICs will be within the tolerance of the better grade most of the time, so you would need a huge sample size to even detect it.
Worse yet with ICs with different operating temperture ranges, as thats not detectable at all with measuring, but this specific example already was discussed in the video.
So with these counterfeiting examples basically all you have to go by is how well the relabeling was actually done, if it was sloppy then it can be detected fairly easily, if its near perfect and measuring isnt viable either well then this is a very big challenge to detect.
although x-ray can spot the change, did it several times
It goes the other way too. There's a number of "obsolete" chips that I would love to stumble upon. Starting with "Fat Angus" chips.
It's usually the opposite. Old versions are nla, and newer ones are subbed in their place as they are cheaper to produce.
The problem is Ebay, Wish, Amazon etc. ... they don't take responsibility for product quality or are able to enforce it. Sellers don't know what they're selling, just what it's believed to be. Buyer sees a Seller Rating but it's only about the online Transaction itself and the rating has very little to do with product quality.
Caveat emptor
What's nuts is that if you sold these products out of a shop, you'd be liable for these counterfeits and held criminally liable.
"One such incident involved the P-8A Poseidon, which is a plane. It flies and whatever." best line ever!
had to replay that a few times - did he just say....
@@paulstubbs7678 +1
It’s all fun & games until you have to ride on one making a magnetic anomaly detector run.
That's not a given, though. Boeing are famous for making planes doing more "whatever" than flying. Just look at the 787 for example.
They're for more like Submarine Hunting.
I used to build analog modems. In the earlier days years they had lots of chips. We tested every Modem to its limits. If one chip or component was bad the unit was rejected sent to the lab to find out why. Sometimes Some of the chips were counter-fit. Its hard for me to understand A chip going into medical or aerospace not being tested.
One word - Profits!
It's easy to understand and involves 'optimizing'(cheapening) costs, saving time and general bean counting
@@fredinit More like the persuit of profits or even more profits.
I've heard that a big client for this 3rd-patry chip harvesting is a repair industry for _modern_ electronics. Many big companies (like Apple) will force their manufacturers into agreement that prohibits them from selling specific chips to anyone else. And when a chip like this dies, Apple isn't bothering to replace the chip itself, offering whole new motherboard instead, because why take $50 from their fan, when they can take $800. So when independent repairers try to enter the niche Apple won't take (economic repairs, data restoration etc.), their only supply is those counterfeit chips. This is an amusingly stable system: a company is multiplying e-waste by refusing to do precise repairs, but then adds an incentive to harvest that e-waste for parts that people who try to do precise repairs cannot aquire by legal means.
Ah, Apple ... I bought a new Macbook Air in 2012, the larger size. It lasted 8 months. I was very careful about it, and it just started failing in all kinds of random ways. I managed to sell it to a guy (who I think repairs or has a repair guy) for a few hundred $ before it became a doorstop. Of course I'd gone to the same Apple store where I'd bought it at the first signs of trouble and they said, "You don't have Applecare? We can't help you!". Now, the fluxes used on modern circuit boards are water-soluble and often "hygroscopic" which means they'll actually attract water out of the air. This is not a problem if the circuit boards are properly washed off after being soldered. But I have a theory they leave just a little bit on, don't wash the boards quite well enough, so they'll fail in a year or so and then if you didn't pay a few hundred for an Applecare plan, then they have a good chance you'll just a new laptop because you're married to the Apple ecosystem. Joke's on them, I got a few-years-old Windows machine that turned out to run circles around the new Apple for battery life, and never looked back. Used Dells are a great value.
Apple has the boards repaired themselves. And then charges arm & leg for a swap with a repaired board.
I can understand counterfeit chips being in consumer products, but military systems?? I was under the impression that the whole supply chain for mil spec kit was heavily audited with traceability going right back to the fab (l guess one of the reasons mil spec costs so much). Thank you for the video, interesting and informative as ever.
The supply is supposed to be documented but people fake the work. The incentive and reward is there. Just don't get caught.
The military situation is almost certainly a contractor that serviced an old assembly and the part required was out of production. They would then need to get authorization to purchase from gray channels. Nothing nefarious or unexpected here, just a good reminder that sufficient stock needs to be held of replacement parts on critical infrastructure, which is not something the government is good at doing.
They are usually injected to a normal market and you have almost no way to know. Fake chips are still common even with a good supliers, because there is always someone who is willing to make some extra money on doing something shady.
I mean if the lowest bidder is heavily audited then sure. But the WHOLE us military, at least, and probably others, is built on the basis of selecting the company who will do what they need for the lowest cost. It's done some bad things like the Camp Lejeune water thing
"mil-spec" doesnt always mean quality though
Its often: Shit that works for lowest cost =)
The depth of the detail on an already unique and at times obscure topic is always impressive. Many thanks for your work and commitment to keeping the masses who wanna stay informed aware of whats really going on!
@Wayne's World of Science and Technology agreed.
This is unconventional warfare of China.
Supplying fake chips to the West to kill their soldiers
You missed one. I've been a MCU test engineer for 40 years and have seen test move over seas. I suspect some of the parametric failures are sent to the black market despite the certificates of destruction. They will be functional but not meet spec indicating issues with processing or particulates. The life span of these devices cannot be determined.
I commented the same before reading your comment.
As always, this channel kicks A's. One of the most underrated channels on TH-cam coming from someone in Taiwan but covers semiconductor of the whole globe in great depth and breadth. I am a technical professional that no longer an active combatant but I want to stay informed. All your videos are well researched and credible. Keep up the great work!
This channel consistently posts quality content. Gotta love it.
No counterfeits here. :-D
As a researcher in this area, I wanted to say good job. Very thorough and accurate investigation.
I think this video was great: BlueHat IL 2019 - Andrew "bunnie" Huang - Supply Chain Security: "If I were a Nation State...”
The flip side is that the recycling of obsolete chips keeps a lot of old hardware out of landfill. Lots of 1980s computer chips or sound chips are just unobtainable now without the reclaimed chip (aka NOS (we all know its not)) market. Yes, there is a problem with YM2149 being remarked as an AY-3-8910, which do essentially the same job, but the alternative is a whole load of machines being scrapped.
Hey! ur the dude that made the RC2014! wow. your product is the sole reason why i got into tinkering with older tech and low level programming. you are literally the reason i started college for computer science and debugging. I bought your kit YEARS ago when it first launched on tindie and I still have it on my shelf. I didnt know what i wanted to do with myself for the longest time. I was stuck at home playing minecraft with no passion for anything really for years until someone recommended me your kit. I was 18 at the time and im now 24 and about to graduate with a 4 year degree in comp sci thanks to you. Thank you Spencer.
That's totally different. Not even close to what, he's talking about.
What? No they are not recycling. They are making fakes by taking old stuff and ruining anything working completely. And then scrape off the information what it actually is and relabel it as new and something else then it might actually be. All of it is taking working or broken components and selling them as new whatever. Even if the component is not even working or close to what they are sold as.
How is it recycling grinding and heating up stuff and making SURE it is ruined. And sold as something it actually is not. They are not carefully taking stuff off boards and claiming it as new. They do not even care if it works or what it is as long as it sells and looks like the real thing. Like that is the problem not donor parts witch is real recycling.
@@TheDiner50 You missed the point entirely. but okay...rude
Reusing chips can be a good idea, but they NEED to be sold as such, and not as "new". A toy factory probably will not mind and will get recycled chips for cheaper. Same for some guy just trying to build his own synthesizer. However, pacemaker manufacturers or industries of that same general nature have an actual life-or-death need (of the product user, not the company itself) to be able to source brand new, completely to spec, and traceable parts. That last one is important. If something is ultimately causing danger to life and limb, you NEED to run word up the product chain to get them to both inform all others who bought a defective batch to recall those products, and to make sure the defect is fixed going forward. If there is no product chain to run up because nobody really knows or keeps track of where they come from, bad things keep happening.
And eBay, knowingly and willingly continues to allow sellers, both foreign and domestic (to the US) to blatantly sell (blatantly) counterfeit semiconductors to the American public, with whatever government rules, regulations, laws, and statutes have been passed having exactly zero effect in curbing this, since it continues unabated and has been present for as long as I can remember - certainly well over a decade.
There are a lot of schlock operators on Ebay but not all of us are. I don't sell something at NOS unless it really is NOS. I sell a lot of things as used even though I highly suspect they're NOS but can't conclusively prove it. I'm the quickest draw in town to issue a refund if parts turn out to not work for the customer. (It's not worth it quibbling over a $10 tube of chips anyway). And a lot of the stuff I sell has been in some university's parts room for many decades so I like to think I'm avoiding the fake chips problem by selling chips that are very old.
Settle down there, there's nothing illegal about selling gray market parts. If you want white channel parts you simply need to purchase from an authorized distributor and not a gray channel such as eBay. Regulation is NOT the solution here - the industry already has the solution and you're refusing to use it because you want to save yourself a few dollars and then whine about it.
@@knurlgnar24 Selling counterfeit items is very much illegal in the United States. Claiming that items that are used are actually fresh and new from the factory, is also illegal. Additionally, both violate eBay's TOS.
I'm amazed at the quality of work that goes in these videos. I work in electronics supply chain, and have been for a significant amount of time. The amounts of details that get covered on this channel is just unreal.
I've read of companies selling USB sticks marked as having many times exaggerated capacities. They pretend to bu the high capacity, but just wrap around and overwrite themselves when they reach the true capacity, which may not be detected until long after being bought.
Not only USB sticks, but also SD cards. And sometimes they don't even wrap around, just pretend that the files where written, while in reality only the metadata is stored.
These can be found on Taobao sold much cheaper than market prices
that is very common sadly, almost every overly cheap usb stick you find on amazon or wish will be fake
i have a 8GB one. it didn't have enough space for win10. then I realized. it's now a fine 4GB linux boot drive.
There's 32 tb M.2 drives on Amazon right now for $99. 32 tb M.2 drives do not exist, and a reputable 4 tb M.2 drive is $250.
I just got burned on 3 eBay semiconductor purchases: The first was for 2N5460 P-Channel J-FET transistors which are more rare than N-Channel and usually more expensive. These were perfectly laser-engraved with a Fairchild logo that was just an ‘F’ that was thinner than Fairchild’s normal logo. These turned out to be a mix of common bi-polar PNP and NPN transistors!
The remaining 2 were for 2N6027/28 PUJTs that are really rare. In both cases I found offers for what seemed like legit-clones such as what a company like ON-Semi might reproduce with good quality. However, instead of PUJT’s, they were garden-variety SCR’s!
So, I’ve pretty much quit buying semi’s from eBay since they have knowingly allowed this to go on for decades!
China has been the ONLY country I’ve been burned by. When you call them on it, you get this “We so sorry-We just didn’t know. You Americans so smart-We give you refund right away”. So, the mostly do refund but what a hassle and it shakes your confidence!
Bleh! You should be able to report that seller to Ebay because Ebay takes fake goods very serioiusly - not because of electronic components so much as because of the problems they've run into (and Amazon also) with fake designer clothes and shoes and such things.
Report them to eBay. And test whatever you get against known good ones. Or at least ones that behave the way you need. There are some simple tests, like continuity between pins. It isn't valid for identifying, but you'll know when one is out of spec.
As ironic as it may be, get a LCR-T4, and just double check that they read as the same component as the known good one. Chinese crap, to test Chinese crap. :) Mine seems pretty consistent. And I do the physical exam, to try to weed out crap.
As I recall, the occasional counterfeits have made it to Digikey and Mouser, but they definitely want to keep their good reputation, so they're going to work as hard as possible to avoid counterfeits from going to customers. I'd trust them 99% for selling you good parts. eBay, I'd trust like 10%.
Sure, I've bought some components from eBay, but that's because either I couldn't source it anywhere else, and/or I was going to be running it at a small fraction of it's capacity, so it didn't matter as long as it sort of worked. And I don't build anything for health or safety. No one will die when my projects release their magic smoke.
I mean, you’re trying to buy semiconductors on EBay. What did you expect?
Yep, it's hard to find through hole RF transistors, so counterfeiters take advance of it. Try to find legitimate 2n5109 transistors, it's like trying to find hen's teeth.
One thing not mentioned in this video is reject parts being stamped with new markings. This is how it works:
A semiconductor manufacturer of good repute such as ON Semi will make a production run of transistors. As they are coming off the line, they will be subjected to various tests. The ones which fail these tests get rejected and go into a large bin. Now, it might be that the transistor works perfectly fine, it just didn't meet some specific threshold for testing. None of these reject parts will get to the stage of having markings stamped on them - they are side-lined before they reach that part of the production line.
What you have now is a large bin full of transistors with no markings. These will get sold as rejects - and the buyer won't have any idea exactly what device they are.
Let's say they were actually 2N3055 transistors, a common switching/amplification device.
China will come along, buy up all these rejects then stamp them with the markings for a rare and expensive transistor that might have ratings way in excess of what the 2N3055 does.
We as the consumer buy them, thinking we have got a bargain on an otherwise rare and hard to get device - only to have them go BANG the instant the machine into which they are fitted is turned on.
Or, in some instances they may work for a while, until they fail because they're actually being used in an application that runs them outside of their real parameters.
Part of working with a new power plant company, I, along with many other contractors, had to watch a lecture on counterfeit parts. They covered some electronics and chips but also mentioned things like valves, motors, fans, and other industrial equipment. You can see the problem when you are working with parts that cost $1 million, and the supplier gets a knockoff to make a few hundred thousand extra dollars.
In the analogue synthesiser scene, we need CA3080s, Ua726s, MAT-02s, and LM394s often. Most of the DIY guys just won't even buy from anyone that looks Chinese because of this problem. Thanks for making a video about it.
When one of your products has a part that's gone EOL (end-of-life), and you missed the LTB (last time buy) memo, and some parts broker says they have 50 reels of them... maybe the parts are authentic, maybe they were acquired legitimately 10 years ago from some company that no longer used them, and the broker has been sitting on them. Your options might be really limited.
Anritsu is still selling the test equipment I worked on as an engineer 20 years ago (with many upgrades since then), and some of the circuit designs came straight from the Wiltron 360B, which was designed in the 1980's.
I got one of their 1980's hand held spectrum analyzers. Very nice instrument, easily comparable to Tektronix or H.P.
Wonder if it will be a viable business to place large orders whenever there is a LTB notice for chips and hang on to them for a while and later sell them at double or higher prices....... hummmm
@@someb0dy2 Some companies have tried this in the past and lost their shirts so to speak. Quite risky to try to guess what chips will be valuable in the future.
Well, in that case, what I do is to request a small sample and then I'll thoroughly test them. But I can do that, because the company I work for makes stuff in small batches (200 - 1000/year) and if we buy whole reel, we can be good for another two or three years.
i can't believe even Boeing and the Army got fake chips,i thought it would be just on a hobby level, I've had my suspicions that i got fake stuff on ebay because the circuits i built would work intermittently or work at first and then not work, which is very frustrating because of the hours spent troubleshooting after building and not thinking the chips are at fault, rather blaming myself. even though ive built plenty of circuits successfully. really frustrating.
People are people the world over. You can't really trust any of them either.
Yeah that's one thing you'd realize after a while. As a hobbyist you'd think that the cheapest would do but in reality, a fake/bad part will waste hours on troubleshooting and make you frustrated to the point of burn out. The alternative is to thoroughly test the part but that's an additional investment of time and every part may be different even if the label says otherwise.
Normally they vet their suppliers very carefully. It's part of their process.
@@1pcfred There are companies with good reputations that don't cheat their customers. It's a good long term business practice.
This is great video and I shared it on a PCM hacking/tuning forum I'm on as we deal with this all the time. Clones in older ECU tuning supplies out number genuine. Many of the clones straight up don't work or fail quickly which is completely unacceptable in a critical application as a car ECU or similar module. Some of the members went to extreme lengths to secure a supply of genuine EEPROMs, NVRAM and those exact FTDI ICs in the thumbnail for example.
Even genuine automotive parts that contain semiconductors that are manufactured in China often fail easily compared to the Mexican ones. 6 months opposed to 20-30 years typically seen with the AC Delco parts, which are now made in China by Delphi.
It's always a good day when Asianometry posts a video
Agreed. He does fantastic work.
@@waynesworldofsci-tech agreed.
This is unconventional warfare of China.
Supplying fake chips to the West to kill their soldiers
Why? This gu6 is anti-freedom anti-capitalsm and anti competition
Brother, you are correct.
yes
The French pronunciation @7:48 really made me smile, thanks for doing your best Asianometry!
5:43
no. their situation is NOT understandable"
these suppliers are paid immense premium for those parts with the understanding of how rare they are and the expected posts and efforts that are needed to test and verify them all.
these low quality counterfeits are able to slip by because the suppliers are cutting corners due to greed so the right way to dissuade this from continuing to happen is to slap them with penalties that will wipe away any fraudulent revenue that they have made and remove the incentive of it happening in the first place.
maybe even slap prison terms on top of everything.
Exactly what I was thinking at that moment when I heard him saying that
When one of your products has a part that's gone EOL (end-of-life), and you missed the LTB (last time buy) memo, and some parts broker says they have 50 reels of them... maybe the parts are authentic, maybe they were acquired legitimately 10 years ago from some company that no longer used them, and the broker has been sitting on them. Your options might be really limited.
And, if they're fake, what are you going to do? Sue China?
True, but also the defence contractors are aren't doing any QA
This is a huge, long running problem! I remember fixing an audio amplifier 10+ years ago. I replaced the main output transistors but the new ones kept blowing up. They did not meet the specs from the datasheet. I eventually cut open one of the old and one of the new transistors. The die of the new transistors was much smaller. I was confused at the time but eventually learned the new transistors were fake parts.
Very true, especially for highly sought after items, such as long out of production Toshiba transistor. Finding a replacement parts for older hifi amp can be a periluous journey.
@@jojoanggono3229 Don't even get my started on the Sanyo STK hybrid amp ICs... 80% of the ones available to buy are fake and will blow up either immediately or shortly after you've buttoned the device back up... which is especially annoying because you can't really substitute them with anything else
Yeah I too had a couple rounds of fake Sanyo STK chips then gave up. One was bought from the USA and the other from HK Seller. Both fake.
"which is a plane, it flies and whatever"
Best description of a plane ever
It's the whatever that makes it so useful
I couldn't believe what I heard, I had to replay that bit a few times - yes he did - Wow
Deadpan
Speaking as an engineer, this is the most complete documentation of the problem of counterfeit semiconductor modules. Bravo to the team of Asionometry for the great effort they put into this presentation.
Team of one.
@@Gameboygenius You mean when I speak to myself and my soul I am speaking to the same person?
I was living a lie all of my life! (Just some fun for the moment).
Thanks Gameboygenius, I didn't notice it. Happy Sunday evening by the way.
@@christopherneufelt8971 What...? What I'm saying is that Asianometry is run by a team of one, a person by the name of Jon Y. Maybe a team of two if you count Jon Y and Jon Y's soul as different people.
I already experienced fake chips problem in my work trying to debug electronic circuit and it always worked unstable in final product, but worked well on the table
We had some fake Xilinx CPLDs back in ~2009 building components for the ALMA telescope. The failure mode was so subtle, it is a miracle we detected it. I don't remember how they were acquired but I think it was from a broker after the part had been EOL'd.
I bought some LM317 a few years ago. The price was good but not too good to be true. The first one wouldn't work. The second one smoked as soon as power was applied. I contacted my supplier and they asked me to send them all back. They sent me replacements and these all worked and they confirmed that they had received a batch of verified counterfeits and were profusely sorry for the trouble. They absolutely stood up and took care of the problem and wound up paying me more in discounts than the original parts cost me. I never would have thought something as simple and ubiquitous as an LM317 would be so problematic.
Yes, even low-end IC`s can be counterfeit. I had a similar incident with LM317 IC`s. I ordered the TO-220 style variant (1amp power rating) but on testing the maximum output was 100mA. Upon inspection it was discovered the chip inside was for the TO-92 (100mA) version of the LM317.
You should have named the supplier so other people can use them too.
I've heard there are counterfeit M92 power management ICs for the Nintendo Switch being widely sold to electronics repair technicians. People will buy a pack of chips, replace the faulty one on the board with the "new" one they bought and it doesn't work. They give it to someone else to figure out, that person has real M92 chips, they replace it, and it works. it's scary how common that is for those.
One of the most common counterfeit methods is selling parts that didn't pass testing as either good parts or as lower grade parts. Often times on a reel of parts you'll get obvious failures such as missing dies, no leadframes, etc. When a packaging house is making 10 million parts a year at 9x% yield that's a whole lot of scrap parts that can be sold into the gray market if someone at the packaging house has an in with someone who handles that material.
I've bought a lot of chips off ebay and resellers that've ended up being fakes. Bit of rubbing alcohol on top and some fast and furious rubbing with a ear-bud cleaner and you can frequently see it. I suppose skimmed and non-painted but laser etched would be harder to detect. Also I've had one that when I stuck it in a system instantly blew all the buffering caps surrounding the IC. Strongly suspect it was not functionally what was re-marked.
Hits close to home. Those of us who have a hobby in old electronics have run into this at least once. There are, however, several good videos from folks on YT showing some of the physical methods of detecting fakes. No one likes to loose a whole machine by putting a fake in circuit with good chips, so physical is best.
The Chinese would sell a rat's ass to a blind man and tell him it was a diamond ring.
the thought of something like this causing a nuclear meltdown in a power plant is harrowing
I remember the 2015 FTDI 232RL serial chip clone problem. In fact the clone was better manufactured tham the original, but if it was detected by the windows driver, it blocked it from working and disabled it.
Seems strange that anyone could make money selling a fake chip that costs $0.11.
I purchased a Thermistor interface PCB for a product I was prototyping. When I tested the prototype, it kept reporting the wrong temperature. It turns out the MAX31855 IC on is was a counterfeit and it had a design bug (it was a defective copy). I ended up purchasing a PCB from a trusted source (AdaFruit) to see if that would resolve the issue and it did. This cost me a lot of time. Comparing the ICs, there was nothing visually different between the two. The only way to know the fist one was a counterfeit was the error - or requiring part source tracking which is difficult to get, especially when you are in a parts shortage situation. I an sure I am not the only one to run into this.
I imagine testing costs are going to rise, and get passed onto the consumer. Essentially one group (counterfeiters) are stealing from another group (innocent consumers).
@@brodriguez11000 Yes, that is how things work. Someone has to cover the costs of making the product. As he mentioned, the problem is also driven by how quickly technology is changing. This is especially a problem in Military and Medical devices which have to be requalified if you change them so there is a lot of incentive to not change them. Both of those require vendors to provide record that "prove" that but that proof can be counterfeited (which he also mentioned). Sometimes that happens insincerely but sometimes it is because they are because they have to take what they can get and trust that it is correct of not supply product and go out of business. It is a Hobson's Choice.
End-of-lifes doesn't force a company to go second hand. The company can choose to proactively modernize a design. This is expensive but avoids shady broker components.
Also, safety critical subsystems should be end-of-line functional tested, I'm surprised the aviation sector isn't comprehensively doing that.
A note to those that may think this doesn't concern them: There are old CPUs being relabeled and sold as new and more expensive ones (for example, an old Athlon sold as a new Ryzen CPU), sometimes they even replace the whole IHS, and there are even counterfeit GPUs with fake firmware flashed so it shows as legitimate in the OS (untill you try to install a driver or actually use it). Stay vigilant when buying second hand!
Other examples:
- During the mid 2000 there was a huge batch of counterfeit Athlon XP that were in fact rebranded Geode chips, performing similarly but requiring higher voltages. The story was revealed several years after the incident and it impacted a massive amount of customers around Europe.
- With the rise of Arduino, a lot of cloned AVR chips (and later STM32) entered the market at very low prices. Sometimes correctly described as pinout or code compatible, sometimes totally counterfeit relabeling. Even for the genuine replacement clones, analog circuits and tolerances are often poor and characteristics like voltages, fuses, ISP or watchdog don't match the original specs.
Great video, well put together. I'm hoping that no one is deluded enough to think counterfeiters make any attempt to "manufacturer" an actual product. Ideally, the component or product is imaginary. Counterfeiters exploit greed and processes or people they know. They don't have a creed or any moral code with regards to the consequences of their actions.
Power MOSFETs are quite often counterfeit on aliexpress, as well as LEDs
Almost any semiconductor on Aliexpress is nearly guaranteed to be fake, from generic components like MOSFETs, opamps, etc., to STM32 microcontrollers and other complex chips.
Awesome video. DARPA had an interesting project a while back, essentially making a very tiny
Nice! New Asianometry video right when I was looking for something to watch.
Shaved ICs were a problem back in the 1990s when I worked in contract electronics manufacturing
Real concern is one where the take a 5 watt ic and mark it 50 watt, it will work in test and for short time real word, but will fail allot faster
Hang on, if the buyers bought direct from the original manufacturer or their authorised supply chain, this could not happen. The problem is buying from the cheapest supplier. I can buy from a Toyota dealer or pay half the price and buy my car parts from eBay. The latter is cheaper but I don't expect genuine parts.
Exactly.
What happens often is that when an IC manufacture discontinues the item, a third party supplier will buy up all the inventory and then re-sell them. The original manufacturer no longer support, sell or warehouse them for distribution.
Well that is very true. The problem in developed countries is there is at least a 10 times markup on basic components when you buy from a quality supplier. And even if you search for a cheap supplier you end up paying a 3 times markup. In underdeveloped countries you only pay 25% to at most double the mass manufacturer wholesale cost.
Over the last few years the problem is authorized sellers are out of stock and manufacturers have lead times over a year. I don't think it's about the cost of the chips themselves. It's about companies trying to get enough supply to keep production going.
@@BrianMarshall1 Trying to do low volume low cost in Europe is nearly impossible due to the 10x component markup. Gluing together low cost imported modules is one answer.
issue is not only with counterfeit chips, often scraped chips that does not pass QA will be sold as "good" ones, and there is no way to know until it just fail in manufacturer approved scenario
If one knows one cannot get OEM parts for a "critical" system, one's production testing had better be "good."
So it is not engineers who decide that chip layouts should flip around or get remapped by 1 pin, its a fake chip. That makes so much sense I always wondered why some chips got slightly altered and look the same.
I personally try to reuse components off of dead equipment. Often times, a systemic failure cannot be traced, but most components can be verified as working. I really believe that we need more reuse of electronics components, if they are marked as used.🥰
The world needs more of that 👍🌎😊
~ repliesgpt
“off of” should actually read ·from·
I bought an FPGA chip a long time ago that was marketed as being desoldered and reballed from old equipment. It was for a repair and worked fine. YMMV...
7:48 - "... is like selling a fake Louis Vuitton bag."
Well... at least a Louis Vuitton bag doesn't get me killed.
It is nothing like Louis Vuitton, premium bag doesn't have any performance improvements over cheap ones :) How much weight you can carry in premium bag?
I don't know about y'all
But an old pile of beige computer boxes have me totally intrigued
The thought of old components for my childhood hit me with a fresh bout of nostalgia
There are people who collect old chips like collecting coins or stamps. Some early consumer electronics had some really expensive ICs in there with lots of gold. Early fax machines are one instance I remember.
Blockchain only validates your paperwork, not your goods.
there is also the issue of manufacturers that wont sell spares to 3rd party repair companies, even if the chip is a generic one as companies using the chips have agreements with the manufacturer to not sell to anyone else but them. else why are so many fully functional devices that could be repair easily end up as e waste an example is macbooks, most have texas instrument ic but because apple and texas instruments have an agreement to not sell to anyone other than apply, the spares are near impossible to get unless you harvest it from dead equipment which is 50/50 chance of it being fake. my workplace IT department has a shelf of dead macbooks because of a simple chip dying and apples repair costs the same price as an entire new device, most arent even 2 years old. Same can be said for John Deere tractors, alot of manufacturers dont sell spares for out of warranty equipment and even if they do you cant have your own maintenance teams do it, you have to wait for their technicians which can cause 1-2 weeks downtime.
Why does your company keep buying Apple products? Is it a tax write-off? Stupidity?
I love it when companies say other products cost them money. Its not a cost, they feel entitled to profits they didn’t earn. If they cant compete or root out counterfeits they cant complain.
May be one day an entrepreneur will open a foundry making obsolete chips😜
There's been a trend going around my country where, people take old power bank chips and old feature phone batteries and stick it in a case to make new and very harmful power banks or lights.
These are sold on the flee markets and may explode if used
That's crazy! 🤯 We definitely need to be aware of counterfeit parts, especially when it comes to safety. 🔒
~ repliesgpt
the chipset market now looks like the oil market. when the United States invaded Iraq. Even though Iraq is only responsible for 4% of the world's oil market, prices have immediately doubled. even though only 4% of the world's oil supply disappeared from the market
in some cases, when attempting to make a "clone" product, the company will look at the spec sheets and replicate everything in there. It's interesting sometimes, as it results in bugs from the original design being fixed, or quirks from the spec sheet being inaccurate being patched.
For example, there are some addressable RGB LEDs that the "clone" is actually better than the original, as the LEDs they used are brighter, but able to fit in a smaller package, and fix some problems that make the difference between "I'm done talking to this LED" and "here's the data for the next one" MUCH more clear.
Many software libraries have implemented modes for it, as it's often sold labeled as the original because it's cheaper and on paper works the same. Finding someone selling it directly is shockingly difficult, as at best, their listing has both names in it. So the best bet is buying the smaller kind, since the original doesn't have the smaller size.
In the section of old parts you used a rather poor example at 5:48 :the 65c816 is still made. the 14mhz WDC 65c816 is 100% drop in compatible with the 4Mhz VLSI part shown
It doesn't matter if components are still made. It only matters if someone is buying them. If there's money to be made the counterfeiters will get involved.
@@1pcfred In the section where he was showing the 65c816 he was explaining about old parts not being made anymore, forcing buyers to look outside regular channels. off all (stock) images of chips he choice exactly one of the very few that is still being produced 37 years after introduction.
@@rj7855 there are plenty of old parts that are out of production today. I'm sure someday the part shown in the video will become obsolete too. Someone will still need one to keep old gear running though.
There's no chip to cheap to counterfeit either. Even just on the low volume/hobbyist side, low cost opamps like the OPA2134 are re-etched NE5532s and the ubiquitous LM317 has been relabeled as a variety of just marginally more expensive regulators. Which is frustrating when you chose something specifically for its ability to handle more that 1.5 amps. Of course theres the hoards of out-of-spec transistors, worth only tens of cents each, which also aren't thrilling to discover.
A LM317 relabeled as something like a LM1117 which is low drop out voltage and more expensive.
Thanks for all the great videos! Is that an AI generated image of what's supposed to be e-waste at 7:23? It sure looks like it is - that's a fever dream of non-discernible e-waste looking stuff! What's funny is that in a video about fake chips you've got a fake picture of old computers! Haha!
None of the images are AI generated... There are tells for AI images that you pick up if you've ever done anything with image manipulation or AF. The people that can't tell are the people that have never used these systems. You sir, are the latter.
It baffles me how well the background research has been done with these videos. Keep up the good work!
Counterfeit chips! What next?
Incidentally, have a look at latest high-end fake Rolex watches. Some of them are remarkably good, and require expert investigation to tell apart from the genuine articles. Interestingly, they cost a fraction of the price of genuine Rolexes, which gives some insight to the likely build cost of Rolex watches, revealing that their margins must be very large indeed. Perhaps a story for Asianometry? Your channel is very absorbing.
@F L Lookalikes, quartz circuitry? You don't know much about rolex clone. Here a video to update your knowlegde th-cam.com/video/NVI3uchlto8/w-d-xo.html
@F L Not so! The mechanical movements are visually extremely similar to OEM. The difference lies in the regulator assembly. Rolex uses a particular centrifugal mass adjustment arrangement on the balance wheel. Thus far not replicated. Look it up. Be amazed.
Ironically, the brand cache of rolex is so high that you pay a brand tax even on the fakes. There are better Chinese watches for less money. If anything the fakes actually help advertise real Rolex.
@El Gatto I agree with the first part, but all these excellent fakes hurt rolex. They want their watches to be worn by the legitimately rich and successful, not those who would pretend to be so. It eeminds me of mercedes, who, when they started making wagons, were worried that they might be seen carrying ladders and cans of paint.
@@yuglesstube Not really. Rolex is a brand carried mostly by hype. Wearing a fake still spreads the name around. And, frankly, they sell out of almost everything they make.
Also even though they're luxury now, back in the day they were designed to be tough, and movement iterations since carry on that defunct legacy.
Last year when I was first getting into electronics and arduino, I bought a bag of 50 NAND chips off amazon. After trying many times to get them to work, switching the chip out multiple times in case I had ruined it I finally gave up. I assumed I was wiring it wrong. Ever since I have just made NAND gates manually out of transistors, and now this video has me wondering If I didn't order a bag of fake chips. They were suspiciously cheap but I just thought that was because they are mass produced.
I am an EE with 50 years experience. I do not believe the story of Chinese counterfeit chips for anything but the most trivial types of silicon. The story of the XILINX FPGA fallen out of its socket (it was a PGA) indicates, that when the dies were bonded inside the ceramic housing, they used pins with a smaller diameter. In fact it is even more likely that the socket was incorrect. When these sockets are new, the PGA chip is very difficult to insert (lots of pressure is required) It is considerable easier to remove the chip and when you do insert and extract the chip a few times, the insertion forces is only a fraction of the force required the first time.
Here is my reason, I do not believe that any chip as complex as a FPGA can be reverse engineered in an economical manner. You cannot re-design a microchip based on a look at the exposed die. You have to study its functionality and then more or less engineer it from scratch while being very careful to attain the same specs. Also a FPGA is configured at power up from a separate Flash memory. The bit-stream is encrypted and a closely guarded secret of Xilinx. This protects the user, so reading the bitstream does not allow a thief to regenerate the schematics or HDL code.
However it is possible that the Chinese managed to "unhack" the encryption.
But then, why? All the chips they "copy" are old and the market for them is very limited and little money can be made that way.
Here is what I believe is the real story of what is going on.
China bullies any company who wants to do business in China to provide "technology transfer". This means Xilinx was "arm-twisted" to provide their Chinese partners in the Joint Venture to provide the design files for older chips. Xilinx desided to go along with that idea, since they are one of the most innovative companies on the planet. Anything 10 years old is of no interest to them.
Besides China just does not have the semiconductor technology to "fab" the most advanced chips. Xilinx manufactures in Taiwan at TSMC. Espionage is another explanation but I do not think so.
The shame is on the defense contractor. Apparently their military technology is decades old and the chips are no longer made by Xilinx. The chip in the video was a XC3090... probably 30 years old. It is not available for at least 20 years and when you buy one it is "new" but "old stock".
Note however that the video is discussing counterfeit chips from a wider perspective than die cloning. Recycled chips could also be considered counterfeit if they are if unknown source and not properly valudated. Such chips can have any number of problems like remarked to fake specs, pin corrosion, random ESD or other damage that's causing the chip to go out of tolerance. In a perfect world, a specialty broker would stockpile chips at EOL and sell them long term to military and similar customers. Of course, the market is too lucrative for those honest brokers to be the only players around.
Most of the chip manufacturers have a big disclaimer statement at the end of the datasheet stating that they should not be used in any product that can cause harm or death to human beings should they fail. If you choose to do so you need to request approval from the manufacturer and they will decide if they want to endorse the device or not.
When a business buys parts that can cause harm or death due to failure, the manufacturer puts this thru certificate of compliance "CofC" traceability from date of manufacturing, through distribution and to final customer. It guarantees you get the right part and that it works BUT tends to drive the price way up. Bad part is now some are faking the CofC as well. Get caught doing that = big time jail sentence.
12:40 They could do like map manufacturers, putting in fake citites to expose counterfeit
That requires checking before the packaging step. Doesn't help the e-waste problem.
@@brodriguez11000 very true
A company I used to work for was dealing with significant problems of determining counterfeits from non counterfeits back in 2018 because we were dealing with a chip shortage when one of our largest suppliers discontinued our most commonly used chip, with essentially no prior notice to the company and no replacement targeted. It'd have set back company production by 12-24 months to redesign every board to use a different chip and test the new design to make sure it functioned identically to the old design, so the company had to buy leftover chips from basically every place they could buy them internationally. It became a huge effort of figuring out what was legitimate stock and what was counterfeit. I had started a position at a different company before I got to find out how that all ended.
Fake chips were absolutely everywhere during the 386/486 days of PC clones. Being a retailer back then, here in Australia I'd say 99% of all very cheep no-name 386/486 PC clones had non-functioning cache and other chips on their motherboards. The emergence of 'name brand' boards and cards really saw our market change for the better.
Fake cache was a different issue altogether.
I saw cache memory chips that were all plastic, no silicon inside.
@@gordonwelcher9598 Yeah me too.. Those were the days. 😁
I’m not sure the Louis Vuitton analogy was the best… counterfeit bags still work as intended, and considering the huge profit margins of “luxury” brands, they might even be higher quality.
🤔 No doubt counterfeit parts can't just be swept under the rug, but it's still an interesting point about the craftsmanship involved in counterfeiting. 😮
~ repliesgpt
Its like paying $1000 for a brand name or paying $10 for a copy that does the same job !
It happens in everything in life NOT just electronic chips !!!
Except that this is not a LV bag whose only purpose is to put stuff inside. The fake chip may not do the same job.
Danny, tell me about your feelings after pondering on this: - Paying $1000 for a Hi-Fi prostitute or paying $10 for a back door train station prostitute. They do the same job. ??? ;)
@@chefnyc yep the fake chips have often less tolerance or less characteristics when they aren't simply partially defective dies or relabeled chips from lower skus.
It's stuff like this that makes me glad I found your channel last year. Incredibly informative. Wouldn't know about these things otherwise. x_x
Thanks for watching and glad you found it so informative 🙌 Glad I could help and hope you keep watching for more interesting tech topics 🤖
~ repliesgpt
its pretty ok, but people who completely relies on these vids instead of doing at least some of their own study are bound to be misled which are majority of people
A couple of years ago we saw excessive failure of a diode used in one of our products. Our bill of materials called out a diode with part number manufactured by Fairchild (a US company). We asked our Chinese contract manufacturer for a picture of the reels that contains the diodes. The reels had a label showing the correct part number and manufacturer. We asked them to ship us a reel and we sent it to Fairchild for analysis. Fairchild x-rayed the diode and told us it is not a Fairchild part.
That is your fault for using a contract manufacturer. If you had been making the stuff at home and buying from Fairchild that wouldn't have happened.
Hello there! I'm curious, do you have a team working with you to make these videos or do you make these all yourself? The amount of research required for these videos must be incredible.
Thanks for the interesting videos!!
We make these ourselves. You are very welcome!
@F L Yes
Maybe he has clones of himself? 😀
Some times the scam is simply printing fake 128 meg labels on four meg memory chips. My son who has mental health problems saw a huge difference between in store prices and on line products. Not having the wisdom to be suspicious at his young age tried to buy these and sell them at the local flea market. Being an honest man the following week he returned everyines money. Only a teen he learned a valuable lesson about buying anything Chinese
Waiting for some old, desoldered chips from a seller on Aliexpress. :)
Lol, I buy a lot of fpga boards from aliexpress that are lower priced than the fpga themselves. I dont want to know the truth, the lie makes me happier.
It's already there
"New" h61, g41, h55, h81 chipsets (Intel has stopped manufacturing them long time ago)
@@arthurswanson3285 My amplifier chips arrived, I hope at least one will work.
I love harvested chips that cover places I can't buy anymore because surface mount is now so ubiquitous and a lot of the old designs I populate are THT. So these chips are not fake unless they are sold as new.
But do you know, that desoldering could be done with open flame and impact to board? :v And then pins are conditioned in solder bath, that's it
The components are counterfeit (fake) if they purposely sell you a remarked part that is not the part that it is supposed to be. Even changing the lot or date on the component is an act of counterfeiting. Many of the chinese counterfeit parts are harvested, cleaned up, blacktopped and remarked to be a better and/or newer version of what it was originally. That purposeful misrepresentation of the part fits the definition of counterfeit.
I might actually trust the chinese if they advertised and sold them truthfully. List them as used (or reclaimed or whatever) and leave the original markings alone. But now they simply find something with the same pin count - blacktop it and sell it as whatever is selling that day.
Continuing to buy the counterfeit parts only emboldens the criminals to sell more fakes which will continue to get worse as time goes on.
This sounds petty compared to the severity of the story being told here, but this is an issue for vintage tech fixers and refurbishers. The commodore sid chip and other vintage CPUs are faked quite often. especially for hard to find parts. you think you bought from an old lot of 1802 cpus from ali expres, thinking they were pulled working from some old e-waste, when they were actually just some random chip with the same packaging, scrubbed and laser etched with the old logo. :/
6:50 sounds almost what I did in the 90's except I did it in the oven at my dorm as a poor student who just wanted to get the chips from PC motherboards. Oven heated to max, motherboard in and after awhile take out, flip upside down and gently bang it to something hard and almost all the chips and connectors would fall off. I think I still have some of the ISA-connectors somewhere.
However, some venerable parts have had legit die redesigns over their lifetimes. 555 timer, 7400 series logic, etc. Some of these have been in the industry for 40-50 years. Specs, pinout, etc. exactly the same.. only rather than it being on an 8-pin DIP, its an 8-tab TSSOP that can fit on your pinky-nail.
its clear where the fake chips come from, along with the other fakes
Yes. A lot of them come from countries other than China. Especially after the E-waste ban.
🙄
We use fake chips for military equipment because original manufacturer no longer makes them. They often fail on low temperatures and need to be replaced. Sometimes the whole batch appears to be faulty. Redesigning the circuitry for new type of ICs is next to impossible.
Muito boa análise
Sempre bom ver brasileiro consumindo conteudo de qualidade
It's massive unfortunately. Especially now with the average person able to easily obtain silk screen, laser etching, etc. equipment cheaply. You even need to be careful using "pulls" and referbs. I think the USA should start making their own chips for mission critical applications, no matter the cost.
Does this affect chips in consumer products like PCs and smartphones? If not, why not?
I'd say not so much because mass market parts are bought direct from the manufacturer in a supply contract so there are few middlemen to introduce fake parts. It's more of a problem at the retail components level, where intermediate stockists may buy the parts from multiple suppliers, and retail supplies are often erratic these days because contract customers are taking all the supply so we have to hunt around for parts for small-scale production, maintenance, R&D etc.
Yes it does. Guitar pedal builders have run into the issue of fake chips and other parts that don't operate as intended. Guitar pedals are mostly "inexpensive" consumer electronics that cost upwards of a couple hundred dollars each on avg.
@J C is correct about the guitar pedal problem. Op amps that have the same pinout as each other will do amplification, but the lower quality fakes often produce more noise, higher distortion or otherwise don't actually function as what they're labeled as.
RIP to the pilot, feel terrible for the family.
Will just thinking about how crap a lot of tech from the USA is it’s a pity how some of this has happened the part that got me thinking is how bad the cars are from the USA