It's too long a story to tell here, but there's a party that builds a gadget that we designed, under license from us. They use contract manufacturers who make near-zero profit. Two years ago, an NPN RF transistor went EOL, and they knew it but did nothing. No CM is going to buy and stock a couple reels of EOL parts. So now they can't build the gadget or ship their product.
So, after over 100 emails involving an average of about 15 people, they found some from a broker. But then they sent them to their QC people, who x-rayed them and found a couple with "wire bond sag wires", so rejected the lot.
Does anybody know about wire bonding? Is this a real quality issue? Seems like it wouldn't matter, and that you might see straight or saggies at various x-ray angles. I could also imagine that the encapsulating process could push the bond wires around a little.
One irony is that this transistor buffers a scope monitor output that is probably never used.