Teach you to distinguish real and fake chips in one second!

In the IC procurement process, what worries buyers the most is not the price, but the quality of the product. There are many kinds of IC chips on the market. If you do not pay attention to the distinction, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference between the various materials, whether it is true or false, new or refurbished. Let the senior IC purchasers teach you how to distinguish between original and new chips.

How fake chips are created

There are hundreds of chips on a wafer. After the wafer is produced, it must be tested and marked with bad marks; the wafer that passes the test is cut and packaged. Chips that are marked as bad at the packaging stage are also discarded. Wafers that fail the test are recycled by the manufacturer who bought the bare chips, cut and bonded by themselves, but chips marked as bad are also discarded.

Usually the formal testing process is time-consuming and expensive, so some fabs will sell untested wafers to manufacturers that need bare chips, and the latter will test them themselves. However, the latter usually do not have good test equipment, and at the same time reduce test items to save money, so that some chips that could not pass in the semiconductor factory are used in the final product, resulting in unstable product quality.

Conscientious people took advantage of these loopholes and developed professional counterfeiting companies. It is undeniable that fake components have become a cancer of the supply chain.

?The appearance and size of the real and fake chips are almost the same

In recent years, many contractors have stopped adding new suppliers once they have established a list of authorized suppliers. There is now a consensus among company purchasing departments that it does happen that production lines have to stop; however, when parts are not available from OEMs, OCMs and authorized dealers, purchasing personnel face few choices. They can either slow down or even stop production by not sourcing components, or buy from suppliers who have not been audited by their own organization or evaluated by any authorized third-party.

As a result, independent distributors, agents, and traders may supply them with components that are original, new, refurbished and used. The one-stop delivery of spot goods according to the BOM is called a distributor in the industry. It is common that they will represent several product lines themselves. For product lines that they do not have, they will buy/or transfer goods from other suppliers.

Almost all people in Huaqiangbei know that some people buy some electrical waste (commonly known as electronic waste) abroad for a long time, and then dismantle, sort, sort, refurbish, pack, and sell them in the electronic market after returning them.

Workers are picking e-waste

Various forms of counterfeiting

The primary counterfeiters are refurbished, with a place in Guangdong as a typical representative. It is to refurbish the old film (usually a disassembled film), and the pins can be turned to be the same as the new one if the pins are crooked.

A higher level of counterfeiting is polishing, making films with similar functions and sizes into more valuable films, and re-branding the logo, so commercial grades become industrial grades, industrial grades become military grades, military grades become 883 grades, and low speed becomes high speed. Low frequency to high frequency and so on.

Thanks to the price of small laser marking machines getting lower and lower, it is easy to use laser marking for refurbished ICs. Some traders will polish them themselves, and some will entrust professional polishing "counterfeiting lines".

There is also a kind of counterfeiting that is at its peak. I personally suspect that a packaging factory is directly involved in it. This is not just as simple as polishing the logo, but it will directly turn dies of different sizes into another package.

The last kind of fraud, to the extreme, seems to be close to whitewashing. For example, sometimes when you go to Huaqiangbei to buy an MCU, the other party will ask you whether you want the original factory or the Taiwan version. There are two situations in the Taiwan version. One is a direct counterfeit product, and the other may be a Taiwanese version. It is produced, but it has also been tested and authorized by the original factory, but it may be a little worse in some indicators, so this kind of goods can not be regarded as fake.