Our end customer is seeing failures of a intersil 82c87 Octal inverting transceiver which is behaving like a non inverting transceiver (82c86). We have opened up the component and the die is marked 82C86. The part may have been rebadged or is counterfeit. Has anyone else encountered this or can recommend a way of detecting counterfeit components?
Mark T
Buy only from franchised distributors?
There's lots of that kind of stuff around in Asia. Sometimes it might find its way into gray market sellers elsewhere. Sometimes the packaging provides clues (bad printing etc.).
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it\'s the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Where did the customer get the chip ..? (asia?)
Search the archives for this group. This issue had a long discussion before.
Yes, my company has been caught by mis-marked ICs before. It was purchased from a regular distributor who had stock. This distributor has a good reputation, but it turned out their supplier, well.......
Anyway, this was an IC which was an old version if the CPU, and the part number had been relabelled.
Now, if we have ANY doubt, we test one of whatever part it may be before using in production.
Jim
-- 10:05 Pacific Time Zone Jun 18 2006 International Time 17:05 UTC 18.06.2006
Good distributor should screen things like this. Otoh, it may be hard for them to spot bad components aswell.
Maybe a small x-ray equipment could be used to look inside to find the conterfeit components .. ? Kind like X-ray -> computerized image comparision.
(any ideas for suitable X-ray source?)
You'd need a very small X-ray source. The usual way of looking at this sort of stuff is with a electron microscope.
Obviously you have to de-encapsulate the package first. When this sort of work was part of my job, (1982-1991) the sort of optical microscope you needed to be able to read the lettering on the chip cost about as much as an electron microscope - of the order of $50,000. Everything has come on a bit since then and an optical microscope probably wouldn't hack it.
As far as I know, conventional X-ray sources don't get remotely near small enough to let you do this kind of fine imaging.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
** The problem of fake and conterfeit parts is world wide and been going on for decades.
This site has details of a few such fakes.
The ONLY successful way to avoid them is to buy parts exclusively from
*authorised* dealers in the particular brand........ Phil
Could have been a simple manufacturing/labelling error - you wouldn't expect a distributor to do a functional test on components. I once had a bag of Holtek 5V regulators from a franchised disti that were actually mis-marked 3V ones. Luckily I found it before they got soldered in!
Do you really need to read the lettering? Chip layout should tell some. Those conterfeit I have seen was so gross you couldn't miss it with a bare eye once the package was opened.
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