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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

At the start of the ROHS era my startup was scrambling to get parts, and we bought some grey-market capacitors. Which turned out to be fakes. What a mess. It's all about the supply chain!

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I'm a huge fan of the knock-off chips that are just a piece of copper connecting all the pins. I wonder why they bother with the copper, instead of just using a block of plastic.

I worked for a huge company with their own manufacturing in China. We did a beta run of a product and they used some black market components for a TI regulator. When we got the boards the output was dead on the regulator so we sent it to TI. They x-rayed the part and it was just an empty plastic package.

Did you have a pretty good idea that this was the case before sending them to TI? Hardware design fascinates me and I'm just curious how something like this goes down.

We actually thought it was a problem with TI's parts, which is why we sent it to TI (we had a dedicated TI rep that came by every 2-3 weeks). When it came back that the package was empty it was actually a little embarrassing for us, since everyone immediately knew they were fakes. A bunch of calls went out and eventually one of the manufacturing managers tracked down the purchasing guy in the factory that said something like, "Oh this was a small run and I didn't want to buy a whole reel so I just ran down to the corner electronics market and picked up a 100."

The package pins start as one piece copper stamping (called leadframe) in order to ease handling and to guarantee correct alignment of the pins. The short between all the pins gets removed pretyy late in the packaging process when the die is actually mounted on to the leadframe.

Even Apple was forced to deal with glued fake plastic capacitors. iMac times, “Oral History of Arthur “Art” Astrin”, wifi pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ?t=1h34m

They may be dummy components specifically designed for testing board manufacturing processes, without using (more expensive) real parts with die in them.

Fakes in which sense? Fake as in they were duds and didn't work, or fake as in they weren't from the specified manufacturer?

Here's an example of a fake electrolytic capacitor bought on the gray market: http://www.discovercircuits.com/dc-mag/Issue_4/Photos/FakeCa...

Wow, reminds me of that fake "500GB external hard drive" which was just a 128MB thumb drive in a 2.5" case.

http://blog.gsmarena.com/how-do-you-spot-fake-chinese-usb-ha...

I bought a few usb flash things on ebay a while back. One had a weird USB connector (hard to plug anywhere). I asked for money back, surprisingly it holds data.

Another was a microsd, I spent 2 hours running through some linux memory testing program (u3 . .. or something similar in name) to be sure it had the right amount and wasn't failing.

I assume there's another capacitor inside the blue one too. Matryoshka capacitors!

100pF ceramic disc ;)

And inside that an 0402 MLCC (they do actually do that)

If they buy their inner capacitors from a similarly dubious supplier, this might even be possible. Counterfeiters all the way down.

I honestly have a hard time believing this--rubycon is a good capacitor brand; why would you put a 'decent' capacitor in a fake product instead of using some cheap chinese crap?

It might be Ruhycon.

Or maybe recycled, note the short legs. Part of this e-waste you are now obliged to dispose of "responsibly" lands on dump sites in Asia or Africa. Some of that ends up harvested for parts.

They were so far out of spec that we had to rework all of the boards with genuine caps.

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