| General > General Technical Chat |
| Counterfeit parts.. |
| << < (7/13) > >> |
| OwO:
At the extortionate prices that most analog ICs sell at it's far cheaper even to do burn-in testing than to buy at list price. Example: ADF4350 - $10 on digikey, $2.5 new on the market, $0.4 NOS. Even just $1 of savings buys at least a month of burn-in testing, accounting for storage, power, labor, and test jig costs. The costs are per-unit of the finished product, not per-chip, so it's easily worth it. |
| peter-h:
I would not slag off FTDI. They are a very good company. They are UK based and support their chips and support designers, both with good quality drivers which just work and with direct support. You get no, zero, zilch support from Prolific or any of the other chinese chip makers. I have used tens of thousands of FTDI chips and never had a single failure. They are entitled to scupper fake manufacturers by not supporting the differences in the fake chips, in the drivers. I agree re passives. I free issue all components to the SMT assembly contractor. And buy all parts from proper distributors. Most are so cheap that it is not worth doing otherwise. Just seen some interesting fake Hanrun RJ45 jacks with integrated magnetics. 1/3 of the Hanrun price. Easy to spot if you compare them side by side, but most people would not tell. The fake ones do appear to work. |
| wraper:
--- Quote from: blueskull on January 31, 2020, 07:10:37 am ---Fake, OTOH, can be testes easily. --- End quote --- If by fake you mean something non functional inside. Otherwise you would need to do quite sophisticated testing for meeting electrical specs and X-ray them. Simply mounting on PCB and device passing tests means only there is no complete dud inside. Otherwise you can "successfully" use 7805 which can't output more than 500mA or transistors which eventually fail at 20% of rated current. |
| peter-h:
That's true, but transistors (other than special mosfets etc) and 7805 type devices are so dirt cheap that why buy them from dodgy sources? I think the "interesting" area for counterfeit parts, from the POV of the equipment builder, is expensive passives, like the RJ45 example I give above. It is very easy to make fakes of these, which may be way out of spec but will still function. And the incentive to buy fakes exists because if a part costs say $1 that is quite significant on a $30 (selling price) product, so a $0.30 fake is attractive. The above video shows a lot of Yamaha parts, last made in (IIRC) 1995, and they would have been quite simple chips to countefeit and end up with something functional. If you make non functional fakes (pretty much the only option for stuff like ARM processors, or even a Z80 which is quite a significant logic design project) then you will achieve just one hit on somebody and then you have to empty out that bank account, disappear, and start again. A bigger problem is hacking the email accounts of chinese companies (seems to be very easy) and when you see a conversation where the context is a new order, and bank details, you fake an email with "updated" bank details. I've just lost $2k this way, and it is *very* hard to guard against. This is another topic :) |
| OwO:
Of course it has to be judged on a case by case basis, but any part that costs more than $1 and isn't arguably very good value is generally a candidate for (1) design-around (2) substitution (3) grey market sourcing. An Ethernet jack is an example where $1 is justified and reasonable value, but expensive chips can be safely skimped on with some QA measures, and you can get total BOM costs down to 1/5th what it would be with digikey prices, which makes the difference between a nonviable product and a competitive one. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |