A fake chip is a chip that isn't physically what it claims to be. It will not work properly. A counterfeit chip is one that was not made under appropriate licenses. It might be exactly the same as the legit chips. It might even come from the same factory line that makes the legit chips and have been tested right alongside legit chips. The only difference between a counterfeit and legit chip can be a line in a contract on a computer thousands of miles away from the physical object with absolutely no physical imperfections. If you are using a computer, or any other complex machine, chances are that at least some tiny corner of it wasn't made in 100% accordance with IP laws.
If an article wants to talk about "fake" chips then talk about fake chips. Don't go on about counterfeit chips and violations of intellectual property laws. Show me the chips that are not doing the jobs they are supposed to do.
Even a counterfeit that's "third-shift" manufacturing by the factory doing the genuine brand product might not covered by engineering assurances by the brand (which is part of the job it's supposed to do).
Or that third-shift might, although using the same tooling and having access to IP and processes, cut corners on sourcing or QA.
Or it might use the exact same everything, but skimp on the QA testing and culling.
Or (not third-shift) it might be from a genuine run, but have failed QA.
That's mostly just third-shift. The problems can get worse from there, even if the product at least initially appears to do the job it's supposed to do.
It isn't always that simple. I had some counterfeit usb-to-serial chips that worked fine until the real manufacturer updated the windows driver and simultaneously made it hard to install old drivers. Risk is risk.
As I understand it, Prolific didn't just make it hell to use the clone PL2303 chips but also the older revision of their own chips which was being cloned - their newer drivers disabled both just the same. Which suggests that using any chip from Prolific is risky no matter where you source it from.
Reading the article, it's full of scare words like "could" and "will" with a noticeable dearth of evidence. Not to bury the lede, but one of the main sources of the article (Steve Calabria) is a component distributor, as well as a representative of the industry group representing component distributors. [0]
From the article:
> As part of his research, Das regularly monitors counterfeit reporting databases like ERAI, and although it is too early to notice a surge, he is confident that the number of reports will start growing in the next six months as companies realize they have been sold illegal parts.
Further down:
> Although only based on his own observations, Calabria is also convinced that this is only the start of a wave of counterfeit semiconductors creeping into the market. "I think we are on the cusp of a major problem here. The worldwide shortages have opened the door for criminals to exploit the electronic component marketplace, and I'm seeing early signs this has already started to happen," Calabria tells ZDNet.
It's not just about licenses. Fake chips, as Lego bricks with pins, do exist (seen them decades ago on cheap PC mainboards), but there also are grey areas made of discarded lots that didn't pass testing, lower specs parts relabeled as higher ones, for example consumer rated parts rebadged as industrial if not military, etc. Those are harder to spot, unless they're tested almost one by one. That would be unsustainable save maybe for the military.
I don't think it's quite so straightforward from the end user's perspective -- if you get stuck with a counterfeit, even a functionally identical one, you're still missing valuable "features" that aren't part of the die, like a warranty. And that's assuming the counterfeit is made to the same tolerances, and won't prematurely fail because it was a reject that didn't meet QC and got siphoned off for resale.
>This has led to global shortages that have now trickled down to most industries that depend on electronic components, ranging from basic home appliances like microwaves and refrigerators to the automotive sector.
...to the semiconductor equipment sector. We can't get components to make the controllers that control the machines that make semiconductors.
We were quoted $40 for a $4 STM32 microcontroller, by a component broker. Due to our desperate need, we caved in and paid for the 10x price and our only hope at this point is that the parts will be genuine. Sigh.
Your experience sounds similar to ours. We're an engineering company in the UK; in better days we paid £3,000 for 1,000 chips. Today we paid £58,000 for the same amount.
Disregarding chip shortage, this sounds like a reasonable outcome after the pandemic anyway. Somewhere, all that money that was lost needs to be recuperated - partly in inflation.
No, that's not the type of inflation that benefits anyone.
Stagflation is what happens when you have a supply shock (usually natural disaster, political instability, bans or outright wars). Prices go up but incomes do not because nobody is being hired.
For example, when you ban recreational drugs, the cost of drugs goes up as the supply dries up. At some point you can't raise prices anymore and the dealers start cutting the drug with whatever they have available like fentanyl.
What we need is an inflation cycle closer to this ideal: consumers start buying products -> productive companies start earning more -> companies start producing more products -> companies hire more workers -> companies raise wages -> new consumers enter the market that start buying products. Once you reach full employment you raise interest rates to calm the market down and then everything is perfectly fine.
Restaurants are one of the few places where we see the "good" type of inflation because it is resulting in higher wages.
Ah, I didn't meant it as something I think we "need" or what I "like" -- just what I think is coming. Governments have used a lot of money to pay for things: the supply of money has been diluted heavily, and this together with other effects like decreased productivity, will lead to inflation.
Supply and demand example: governments have created a lot of money to pay for extraordinary expenses in 2020 and 2021. Supply of money is now greater and this leads to rising prices (i.e. inflation).
What I mean by recuperation: We don't create more value just from creating money. So if there is more money to go around but the same amount of goods produced, that leads to inflation. We're talking about inflation to adjust for the money created to cover expenses.
So you think everything should cost 10x what it cost last year? Doesn’t seems reasonable to me. Seems like some things are up that much because of supply and demand.
We were just having this discussion at work last week, as we are a low volume manufacturer and are starting to see many of our ICs dry up at the major distributors. We're looking at smaller unknown distributors and Chinese companies on eBay and wondering how do we know we'll get what we order. There doesn't seem much area between the two choices of ordering with our fingers crossed or telling our customers we cannot deliver for 12+ months.
For my previous employer buying from shady sources never worked out. There were many different fakes from empty enclosures to almost working similar parts. Insanely expensive brokers worked well, but buying at 50x price isn’t feasible in the long run.
Many of the fakes almost work. Some are ghost parts. Some are recycled. Some are parts that failed QC or were binned as a lower tolerance part and remarked as a higher tolerance part. Testing for all those possibilities is not economically feasible, especially if you’re outsourcing assembly.
This is much more a “how do I know the 683rd chip on this reel will meet its sleep current specifications [so our device will make its battery life specs]?” rather than “how do I know this is an IC at all and not a fancy Lego brick?”
Yes, that's usually the issue. Often those "salvaged" parts seem to work well enough (with a good power supply, at room temperature) and then after a while all your shipped units start failing...
That's if they're not just straight up a different (or non functional) part that's been re-marked and then you find yourself re-working hundreds or thousands of boards!
Sure, we can test a few when they come in, but we can't necessarily send them back or get our money back if buying from unknown sources in China. If we order samples, we're not necessarily guaranteed that there will be more available to purchase after we get the samples in, or that what we get in the next order will be good even if the samples were.
Fake or Counterfeit Chip has been a thing for a very long time. So chip shortage didn't create this problem.
More people are discovering it because they are desperate for chips and they have to take a bet from unknown supplier. Normally you get like 10 box of solid chip with 1 box that are either counterfeit or fake. Now may be two or three.
Some Manufacture are willing to bet because even if the chip cost 5x or 10x as much, it is still relatively small increase from their total BOM. Think Car as an extreme example, who cares if you pay $100 for chips that used to cost you $10 or even $5 when your car is worth $10K+? Not to mention your operation cost losses when you have no cars to sell.
Chip shortgage, but only on the retail market. Everyone from Lidl and IKEA, through Daimler, to Philips are putting chips in every most trivial device and component.
They presumably had existing supply agreements in place. Some companies would've expected demand to increase due to everyone being at home during the pandemic and planned accordingly.
Counterfeit chips can be a hazard even at the hobbyist level. I've had 2.5A rated DC/DC converters from Ali Express that, if overloaded, enter thermal runaway, and fake MAX232 devices that on any given powerup, have a single-digit percentage risk of the charge pump locking up and getting so hot that you can burn your fingers on them - thermal runaway again.
Apparently a lot of the AVR328s on low-end Arduinos (which are still useful, despite much better microcontrollers existing now) are fake too, though I've never had a problem with one.
I honestly hope some good comes out of the shortage. Like, maybe some products that never needed any electronics get made without them again, or things that have entire computers built into them just go back to a few basic controllers.
A good OLED TV that is just a panel and doesn't come with a slow horrible computer built in would be nice.
My guess would be the exact opposite: current chip shortage has lead to billions of USD more put into new fabs and R&D. I think/hope the market will overreact to this shortage, and I'm excited to see what we will be able to do with all those new faster ultra-low cost microcontrollers in 5-10 years.
Are these "fakes" mostly broken or nonfunctional chips? Or are they mostly chips produced by third party factories without the license for the chip IP?
If it's the latter, I think that would be something to welcome - the official manufacturer can't make enough, so others will. Whether that's legal or not, it's good for the chip buyer. (And chips should be open source anyway, so I don't much care about them violating copyright...)
Somewhat funny, the very bottom of the page above mentioned that "Note that this chip fixes Erratum 2.3 of genuine STM32F103". So the clone is arguably less buggy than the genuine STM32F103, at least in one aspect.
If I remember rightly, one of the big differences of the FTDI fakes in common ciruclation was that some of the advanced functionality worked and behaved according to the spec. This happens from time to time... the NRF28L01+ radio clones are incompatible overr the air with the original because they followed the datasheet, which was wrong.
There is no way to be certain that those chips will comply with the specs and they will taint the supply chain. Traceability is extremely important in the hardware business.
That may be true - I'm not a hardware engineer. But it's interesting that that sounds exactly like the propaganda that proprietary software vendors used to use to warn against open source software - you don't know what you're getting, you have no guarantee it will work, etc.
The difference is that as far as I can recall there weren't people trying to pass off open source as someone else's proprietary software. You didn't think you were buying a copy of Oracle's DB or Microsoft Office and actually get a wrapper around MySQL or a restyled Open Office.
You choose whether your wanted the propriety program or the open source program, fully aware that they were different programs with different abilities, features, limitations, and bugs. You could compare them and decide which suits your needs better and then reliably obtain that one.
With hardware the fakes are being sold as the genuine part. You really don't know what you are getting and really don't know if it follows the spec. You might for example think you are buying a 3.3 V microcontroller that has 5 V tolerant input pins (meaning you can hook it straight up to a 5 V sensor you are using), but the fake is not 5 V tolerant and won't work for you unless you add a level shifter to your design.
There was an article submitted to HN nearly a year ago [1] about fake/counterfeit DS18B20 temperature sensors. That article gives a good look at all the different kind of chips you might end up with when you think you are buying a DS18B20, with lots of details on how they differ from the real ones.
It isn't like stories such as this one are rare. Unlike the FOSS v. Proprietary story where it's all anecdotal, we have actual events like this [0] one:
> These differences mean the fakes likely have higher power usage and lower sensitivities, even though they are functionally identical. The foundry could have marked these devices as Si24R1, which is compatible with the nRF24L01 and no one would have been wiser. But the lure of higher profits was obviously too tempting.
There’s a difference between open source and counterfeit chips. If someone wants to make alternate parts with similar specs, that’s fine and a normal art of business. The issue here is chips that look genuine but aren’t.
It would be nice to have a chip that works or doesn't work at all. But there's a large amount that mostly works until it doesn't someday, somewhere and that can make millions of expensive electronics completely useless because some fake $0.02 chip died, plus the aftermath of who's at fault is another can of worms.
The part I don't understand is why didn't it fix itself relatively quickly once they realised the demand for ICs was there? Is it just because the demand is far greater than they ever had so the backlog is growing more quickly than they can produce?
Others have talked about it mainly affecting high-end silicon rather than all components but I assume that most equipment now needs at least 1 high-end component as CPU or microcontroller?
The fundamental reason is foundries work really hard to make sure they have zero idle time, by booking time months in advance, so there wasn't a lot of slack in the system to absorb the extra demand when it hit.
Add some confounding factors like, it takes a long time to build a foundry, in general the CAD is specific to a foundry, not every foundry can make every part, and even if they could, they're not licensed to then: You get a global chip shortage that takes many months to unravel.
As I understand it, there are lines with spare capacity, but the work to move manufactures takes time. Even for the same process/wafer size.
So it's not just a capacity shortage per se. Rather, a situation where real demand was wildly different (higher, and lower) than predicted demand, and re-spreading work is hard.
A fake chip is a chip that isn't physically what it claims to be. It will not work properly. A counterfeit chip is one that was not made under appropriate licenses. It might be exactly the same as the legit chips. It might even come from the same factory line that makes the legit chips and have been tested right alongside legit chips. The only difference between a counterfeit and legit chip can be a line in a contract on a computer thousands of miles away from the physical object with absolutely no physical imperfections. If you are using a computer, or any other complex machine, chances are that at least some tiny corner of it wasn't made in 100% accordance with IP laws.
If an article wants to talk about "fake" chips then talk about fake chips. Don't go on about counterfeit chips and violations of intellectual property laws. Show me the chips that are not doing the jobs they are supposed to do.