Chinese clones attack STM32 microcontrollers

[hamdi.tn]

well it's totally wrong ... i mean taking for free the hard work of hundred of engineers and the financial risk to develop a chip or whatever product and not even change the name, and sell it on the market as a replacement for the original product is totally fucked up way to make money ...

Western companies do that all the time, they are just more subtle about it - use a different name and box, and it looks like a unique product. Companies do teardowns, analyse all the design and BOM, and see what can be copied. You can pay companies to give you a report.

I know several cases in the West where companies have completely ripped off other's products.

Anyway, it's called "competition", everyone tries to undercut each other, which is apparently what all Western governments are in favor of. Unless it's some people with a different color skin, then it's "unfair".

it's always unfair no matter what color skin they have, and i don't think western governments are in favor for that , since all western country have a set of law to protect IP and copyright and patented design.
now am not saying that western company are not doing that either, but it's totally less obvious to detect, and copying a part of a design is not as harmful for the original company as selling the copy as a direct replacement.

[amyk]

The final irony : even the Olimex guy complaining about Chinese rip-offs buys direct from China. It's all about the money. They are not "forced to" buy there, they choose to do so. If you have moral objections to rip-offs, don't feed the dragon.

Yeah, fuck that guy. He doesn't have the volume to get lower prices, so he looks to China. What happens when Olimex stuff is cloned?

Nothing, because it's open-source.

But I don't see anything wrong with this either, if they have core (and probably some peripherals) license from ARM and they aren't selling them as actual ST parts. ST can't copyright register addresses and pinouts. Would you also complain about ST (or the dozen others) making "clones" of the 7805 from National?

[hamdi.tn]

after 2 minutes research i found this link
http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Law_at_ESA/Intellectual_Property_Rights/About_semiconductor_products

apparently like pharmaceutical industry, design right in electronic industry expire too after 10 years.
That explain for me why everyone can produce same old chip like 78xx regulator or all the old TTL and CMOS logic chips.
the ST32F103 is a mature product ,am not sure when it was available for sell the first time, if it's beyond 10 years well the Chinese can produce no problem at all.

[bookaboo]

The final irony : even the Olimex guy complaining about Chinese rip-offs buys direct from China. It's all about the money. They are not "forced to" buy there, they choose to do so. If you have moral objections to rip-offs, don't feed the dragon.

Yeah, fuck that guy. He doesn't have the volume to get lower prices, so he looks to China. What happens when Olimex stuff is cloned?

Not sure if you are serious, if he's looking for genuine parts he's well within his rights to look anywhere he likes. Free market 101.
If anyone is at fault there it's a greedy and inefficient western supply chain. Ironically western distributors may gain from this as manufacturers like Olimex will have doubts about the China supply chain.

[ataradov]

Ironically western distributors may gain from this as manufacturers like Olimex will have doubts about the China supply chain.

I don't think so. Apparently those chips were on the market for quite some time now and there are no signs of repackaging them as genuine STM parts.

And given all the differences between the devices, it would be trivial to realize that device is fake/remarked.

I don't think they are doing anything wrong on the HW side. In fact, I applaud them. There is no reason to multiply the number of parts with incompatible peripherals.

[coppice]

after 2 minutes research i found this link
http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Law_at_ESA/Intellectual_Property_Rights/About_semiconductor_products

apparently like pharmaceutical industry, design right in electronic industry expire too after 10 years.
That explain for me why everyone can produce same old chip like 78xx regulator or all the old TTL and CMOS logic chips.
the ST32F103 is a mature product ,am not sure when it was available for sell the first time, if it's beyond 10 years well the Chinese can produce no problem at all.

Actually that doesn't explain why so many people make things like the 78xx and TTL logic. In those days manufacturers sought out other manufacturers to make true second sources of their parts. Many industries, like telecoms and defence, refused to use anything that was not available from a true second source. This continued up to around 1990, when practices changed. When Philips/Signetics, ST and Motorola were all making 68000 devices they actually ran joint events to promote new devices. AMD originally second sourced 8086s, because Intel needed them to do so.