Chinese clones attack STM32 microcontrollers

[Gabri74]

Here they come....   

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/chinese-clones-attack-stm32-microcontrollers/

[Gabri74]

Ohhhh man, they even cloned the crappy ST product selector ....   

http://www.gigadevice.com/product-category/1.html?locale=en_US

[Gabri74]

Downloaded 'firmware' and USB libraries from this link:

http://www.gigadevice.com/product-downloadmcu.html?locale=en_US

They are a complete ripoff of ST Libraries    
Basically they only removed the copyright headers and slightly changed some functions.

How can this be possible even in China ?   

[ataradov]

That reminded me of this story from a year back https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/3-arduino-possible-holly-molly-chinese-avr-clones-are-coming-meet-lgt8f88a-mavr-core-processor/

[donotdespisethesnake]

How can this be possible even in China ?   

You pay some money, you get whatever you want, unfettered by government regulation. That in essence is the capitalist principle, kind of ironic that the Chinese enthusiastically embrace this principle more than we do

It's not clear these are illegal clones, obviously copying software and removing copyright headers is illegal in most countries, so I wouldn't hold high hopes that the silicon design is clean.

Once I asked ST why they have such silly licensing on their "free" software, they explained it was to prevent clones. Quite obviously, people who are willing to clone don't care about the legalese, so that idea is never going to work and just makes it awkward for people who want to use genuine ST devices. I don't believe for a second that ST are licensing their designs to GigaDevices.

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.

[MT]

Chinese clones attack STM32 microcontrollers

Really?

[Gabri74]

 STM3II   

[hans]

I wonder.. is the ARM Cortex m3 core itself licensed offically.. or also a "cloned instructionset"? 

[langwadt]

How can this be possible even in China ?   

You pay some money, you get whatever you want, unfettered by government regulation. That in essence is the capitalist principle, kind of ironic that the Chinese enthusiastically embrace this principle more than we do

It's not clear these are illegal clones, obviously copying software and removing copyright headers is illegal in most countries, so I wouldn't hold high hopes that the silicon design is clean.

Once I asked ST why they have such silly licensing on their "free" software, they explained it was to prevent clones. Quite obviously, people who are willing to clone don't care about the legalese, so that idea is never going to work and just makes it awkward for people who want to use genuine ST devices. I don't believe for a second that ST are licensing their designs to GigaDevices.

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.

depends on your definition of forced, if the choice is between buying in China, or close the company because buying it elsewhere  makes the end product is too expensive to be sell-able, then it isn't really a choice

[langwadt]

I wonder.. is the ARM Cortex m3 core itself licensed offically.. or also a "cloned instructionset"? 

you can't  patent an instructionset so in principle there is nothing wrong with making a cpu that runs ARM code (ala. AMD/Intel x86),
but, atleast for the old ARM7 it was impossible to make fully compatible cpu without violating ARM patents on afair interrupt handling.

There was atleast one company that tried and was killing by ARM

[Bassman59]

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?

[wraper]

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.

OLIMEX Ltd
Nov 10, 2015 @ 09:45:57

I will tell you how it works. All EU distributors are public companies with lot of shareholders, the shareholders care not for the product these companies sell, but for the financial results at the end of the year.
So they should squeeze maximal profit from their sales or they are dead – look how many different distributors merged and were boughts last years, basically what left in EU are 2-3 big distributors, some of them even share same warehouses. Volumes are not like in Asia and they try to charge triple prices to meet the shareholders expectations. Semiconductor vendors also are in this game, they try to return as fast as possible the money they put in the development, so they also try to see if they can sell at higher prices for certain markets.
So when you go to EU distributor and ask how much this does cost? He most likely will not tell you the price, but first will ask you what is your end product and what is your target? i.e. to see what idea do you have about the pricing and if they could screw you up more if you do not know what is the market price of this component.
In China there is huge market and huge competition, so these tricks do not work. Chinese traders are very pragmatic, once one of them get better price, he start selling to all others, this means if in EU distributors can screw up the small companies selling them STM32 for $10 and at the same time to sell the same chip to the big vendors for $2. In China once one distributor get $2 price he start selling to all other at $2.20 and no body buys at higher price.
I don’t know how do you measure the difference in prices between ST and GD but what I see is: STM32F103C8T6 price $6.10 for 1 pce and $3.20 for 1000 pcs in EU/USA disti and GD32F103C8T6 for $1.25 in Taobao buy 1 or 1000 pcs, this is not few percent this is almost 5 times difference for small volumes.

[janengelbrecht]

Hmm i really thought that international trade aggrements could somehow lead to a common fond so manufactures who discover that their patents are compromissed could get their legal fees payd by some common funds payed my member states and their companies. But obviously the politicians havent been that smart  yet. Of course it should be so if someone is found guilty its is up to his country to take action and if they dont there ought to be a rule that said that this country was not allowed to do trade with any other country in the world anymore.... but no such an aggrement exist...its pure Wild West out there
What is the meaning with trade aggrements that doesnt work

[helius]

WTO actions are very expensive and likely require a commitment on the part of the affected countries' governments to pursue.

[ataradov]

Apart from stealing the software (par for the course in China), they are not doing anything wrong. Anyone can make a clone of any peripheral set they like.

Russians are making clones of old Altera FPGAs. And yes, they are suggesting you use original Altera software and programmers

[SL4P]

WTO actions are very expensive and likely require a commitment on the part of the affected countries' governments to pursue.

Easy way out...
The clone manufacturers first response to a ruling will be 'we promise' to stop manufacturing clone product.  Given 90 days by trade ruling to comply. (We don't want to destroy livelihoods, and 2 million parts already in distribution channel...!)

Key point: Specific high-tech components only have a lifespan of a couple of years between major revisions anyway, and the original action took over 12 months to frame in legalese, and pass through the various governments / parties...

Clone manufacturer starts tooling up for rev.2, and takes 120 days to shutdown the rev.1 distribution (ahh sorry, hard to get new supply chain running... very sorry).  Excess stock is recalled and dumped to untraceable Shenzen market traders (at cost - no loss).  These appear in your pet collar trinkets, and third tier unbranded junk.

Two months later, the manufacturers have complied with the trade ruling, and created a newer, more profitable channel with rev.2 for the next 18 months.

P.S. This adds to the sell price of the OEM product - so they have any chance of making any return within the ramp-up period.

Governments and first-world society are suckers for a story.

[hamdi.tn]

Apart from stealing the software (par for the course in China), they are not doing anything wrong. Anyone can make a clone of any peripheral set they like.

Russians are making clones of old Altera FPGAs. And yes, they are suggesting you use original Altera software and programmers

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 ...
if there is a mechanism that force component to move to public domain after a number of years than okay, but the way Chinese are doing thing is totally irrespectful for the hard work of lot of ppl
this will discourage company to develop furtherand will discourage them to do open source software and hardware as well.
What i hate the most about all this is that development company encourage Chinese by "feeding the dragon" , PCB, components are imported from china and this is only killing domestic business.

[richardman]

Our first PCB products were manufactured in China. Our second/third were made in US and Korea. If hobbyists and product makers insist on the lowest cost regardless of the source, i.e. the Walmart model, and coupled that with a country not bound by international laws, this is what will and does happen.

The only solution is for the state governments from US and EU et al to put pressure to effect real changes.

[donotdespisethesnake]

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".

[autobot]

Looking in octopart for a random ST part , i see there's a Chinese AUTHORIZED distributor , selling at half the price:

https://octopart.com/search?q=STM32F&start=0#/search/modals/allPrices/0e98c7ea3b11d15f

So i assume this a legal part, right ?

[all_repair]

Is it a clone, or a balant exact copying?  Cloning is not new at all in this industry.  We have AMD cloning Intel for ages. 

[ataradov]

It is a clean re-implementation. There are some bugs introduced and some are actually fixed. And that's why I'm saying that it is OK. But copying software as is in not OK.

In a modern world making an MCU is just half the battle, vendors have to provide decent software support and short-circuiting that second half by using stolen software is a bad practice.

[coppice]

Is it a clone, or a balant exact copying?  Cloning is not new at all in this industry.  We have AMD cloning Intel for ages.

AMD have never really cloned Intel devices. There was a time when they made second source versions of Intel parts, in cooperation with Intel. That doesn't really count as cloning. Later they started making their own original designs, which execute the same instruction set as an Intel device, and have all the necessary Intel patents related to that fully licenced. These look nothing like the Intel parts, so clone is not an appropriate term.

[ataradov]

These look nothing like the Intel parts, so clone is not an appropriate term.

And AMD was first with 64-bit version as well. Not that it helped them a whole lot.

[baoshi]

GigaDevice has a proper license for the ARM core. It looks to me a reimplementation of ST peripherals to me.