Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatherders | Hacker News Reader

I used to own a semiconductor distribution business. The amount of refurbished and counterfeit material out there is staggering. There is more money in obsolete parts than most people realize and, as a result, selling refurbs is incredibly lucrative. I'm talking 100x markup on a 5k reel when the customer needs 10pcs.

This story, while sad, is not the least bit surprising.

View on HN

Even here in small-scale embedded land we get bitten by it from apparently reputable vendors. We've had to cultivate direct relationships with certain companies to avoid it, and setup a whole acceptance pipeline for some of our parts. Frustrating as hell.

Yeah even in my lay experience, this stuff sounds exactly like the stuff that I can expect to get fake components for on eBay/Amazon

> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip

But the part I don't get is that those three companies are manufacturers not suppliers or distributors. If you're manufacturing your own device, how is it counterfeit?

Because you aren’t, you can’t keep up with demand so you’re cutting outsourced supply in with your in-house stuff.

Wut? I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

Suppose I make a proprietary electronic component. There is no other source of that component. If I can't keep up with supply, where are these "outsourced" parts going to come from?

[edit] re-reading the article, I think the author or someone else who made the presentation misinterpreted the facts.

FTA: "Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit"

What's most likely the case is that the potentially counterfeit parts were labelled with Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix markings/logos and they were misidentified as the source of those parts. That's the only thing that makes sense.

The person you replied to is making an accusation of intentional fraud.

Although I don’t think that is likely. If you were going to defraud your customers with components you know are fake, the US government would be the last customer you’d choose to send them to.

So, I've never done anything where lives and health are on the line, but I've built tons of stuff out of salvaged space-age transistors. What's particularly wrong with refurbishment as a practice? There is a lot of good material out there, much of which is no longer made and has no contemporary equivalent.

The issue is that the process of refurbishment is fairly hard on the components. Companies in China will obtain decades old ewaste boards and then have workers hold the boards over fires to melt the solder and pull the chips out with pliers. The chips are then sanded, "blacktopped" (covered in a tar-like coating that looks like the IC plastic), and re-marked. This crude process (exposure to extreme heat, no controlling for ESD, etc) can result in chips that have latent defects, on top of the unknown age and uptime of the chips. Another issue is that companies will commonly lie on the re-marking, doing stuff like changing the grade from consumer to military spec, lowering the access time, upgrading the die revision, or mislabeling the chip entirely. For example, Amiga and Atari ST fans have had issues buying Motorola 68060 chips from Asian vendors, as they will commonly relabel 68LC060 chips (which don't have an FPU) as regular 68060 chips.

More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k72SFBOZ_lw

Thanks. That wasn't what I was imagining. I was imagining disassembling a retired aircraft (or other thing) and putting the parts back in inventory, not sourcing vaguely recovered parts from god-known-who.

"Solid-state" components aren't. Electromigration is real. A used IC is physically different than a newly manufactured one.

Nothing is wrong with PROPER refurbishment.

The first problem is a lot of refurbs are poorly done. I've had parts that were literally something else with a different print on them. Entire controllers that were marked as X but were Y in reality.

The second problem is the buy side. Government especially has regulations for quality control and counts on suppliers to do their part. Check out MVP Micro for a company a decade or so ago where the owners were profiteering off refurbs and wound up in prison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com