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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't you be able to test an IC?
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 m…
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!
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 o…
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.
counterfeit /= fake. 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 b…
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 o…
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…
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.
counterfeit /= fake. 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 b…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
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.
It sounds like it's actually a $40 microcontroller, then.