I've had 40 orders from AliExpress. Twice I got the wrong thing, disputed the order and it cost nothing (no need to ship it back).
No problems with the other 38. Just check that the vendor has had actual orders and +ve feedback, and use Ali's escrow for payment.
I make a board with a part that has gone obsolete. I find inventory at Arrow still, but I have no idea how long that will last. I see lots of vendors on Alibaba/Aliexpress with this part for prices not far from what they were when they were still made. But I don't know how to trust anyone from Alibaba. I had one bad experience where eventually I had to cancel the order before the data I could no longer dispute it on the credit card.
I also found an outfit in a Google search, vnsky.com. I did some research and they seem to not be a reliable source... to put it mildly...
lol
I'm thinking I need to stay away from the grey market. :(
-- Rick
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves >:-} ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Yeah, your hair will last longer. Think about where those parts might have come from. There are legitimate places- they could be recycled from retired equipment, for example.
Treat them with the same reverence that you would a dodgy-looking dude wearing ill-fitting clothes and selling stuff he doesn't understand at a flea market and you won't be disappointed too often.
There are good vendors on Ali* and very bad ones.
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
Sounds like it's time for the life time buy.
I've ordered one part from Alibaba, (LCD rear view backup monitor... with no more TV's it's the only cheap thing with a video input.) (The ones ordered from amazon were flaky.) It was mostly a random choice between several vendors, I sent several emails and then picked one. So far so good.
George H.
I got in this position on a board some time ago. It was the 5 V Xilinx 9500 CPLD. Nobody in the US (franchised or grey market) had any, so I popped for some from China, fully knowing the risks. Well, the parts had no pin 1 dimple molded into the package, so I was immediately suspecting they were counterfeit. Generally, they DID work, but I had maybe 10% that would not program, or even give the right device ID on the JTAG. So, I suspect they may have been discarded wafers or spares left over from authorized production, and were packaged with no die testing. But, I'm just guessing about that.
I finally used up all the old boards and redesigned for a newer CPLD.
Jon
I have the same experience. Of course it helps when you can immediately validate what you have received. But when I (naively) ordered some Micro-SD cards, received fake ones, and noticed it only after I had confirmed the order, I still got my money back from the supplier. I think they all fear the power of Ali and don't want to be kicked out.
/
I think you will do fine. To make a $6,000 order without getting a few sam ples first ,seems like a foolish error you would not make. Getting a few s amples, checking addresses , etc. is not hard to do. You might lose a few dollars even being careful, but a little common sense would prevent any lar ge losses.
Dan
That's the big problem. It will take some time before the boards would be built and tested, at least two weeks just because my assembly house takes that long to work things into their line schedule. Then if the part is bad we have to rework hundreds of boards.
I guess if I order a small number of parts from a couple/three vendors and verify they are good I would have confidence they would be ok in the future. I guess I'm worried they may not be buying from 100% reliable sources.
I found a company called 4 Star Electronics who can get me enough parts from inventory for now. I am going to seriously consider redesigning the board going forward. I hate to make my customer qualify the product again.
-- Rick
That sounds like a very dicey thing. Have any of those boards come back with failures?
I think my situation is a bit better. Lattice gave EOL notice a year or two ago because the fab line was going to be retired. Rather than let you order for a year or two before shutting down, they gave 3 months to place orders which could be scheduled for any time in the next 3 years. I expect there were a number of folks who placed long lead orders as speculation since there was no money up front. Arrow is selling them at a good premium compared to the pricing a couple of years ago. They may have placed their own orders or may be buying from someone who did.
Once the three years are up I will have much less confidence they are valid parts.
-- Rick
I don't know that samples are really a high assurance that the rest would be good. The samples could easily be from a different lot or the counterfeits could have the same number anyway. I don't know if all Ali vendors are similar, but the ones I've dealt with so far did not understand English well and I don't write Chinese. So it was hard to even ask about things like lot numbers.
For now I'm good. I can still get parts from Arrow even if they cost more. But I'm going to need to do something about it in the future.
-- Rick
Often the quality will drop after the first, second or third order. The samples maybe are the 'golden' ones.
Never send a large T/T to a recipient company name that does not
**exactly** match the company name, especially to a personal account. Escrow service deals with that particular issue. Unless you use an escrow suggested by the seller, in which case you're probably about to be scammed.--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
I don't know why they picked that stupid name- I was at their headquarters in Hanzhou a month ago- they know how to hire good architects, you'd think they'd be able to hire someone to come up with a better name.
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
What a hideous building--even worse than the MIT Stata Center.
Is it any more fetching from other angles?
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
MIT has gone bizarre and far left... and many of us alumni have stopped donating as a result. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I suppose you think this is ugly as well?
-- Rick
Of course it's all about the money, right?
-- Rick
Wow, that's pretty wild. Must be a nightmare to find your way inside.
That's pretty much what it looks like. Most of the the other buildings on their Hangzhou campus are not as 'striking'.
The University of Toronto's postmodern Graduate House design is the worst I've seen:-
It looks even worse in real life - kind of a dull finish and bunker-like feel with those tiny windows. A shame it has been plopped down with nice buildings like Hart House
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
NO! Thanks goodness, but certainly one of the things to worry about. But, then, if these are just untested parts off wafers made using the original Xilinx masks, that may not be all that different than real Xilinx parts (except that **I** end up doing the testing on populated boards.) I suspect they don't do a whole lot of parametric testing either on $1 jellybean CPLDs.
Certainly if you are buying from a franchised distributor, there is no worry of the parts being counterfeit crap. The only unknown is how long they will remain available.
Jon
Trouble is there's testing and there's testing. Any given part might work ok with the present Vss or temperature, but when that changes they may fail due to speed issues. Vss isn't so likely to change much, but temperature certainly can. Then there are likely many other aspects that are not tested very well in circuit.
With Arrow's price a $10 premium, I think I'm going to buy the 361 pieces from 4 Star Electronics. They are at least US and I expect they will work with my contract assembly house, extending credit. If the parts don't work, we don't pay for them. With 70,000 in stock at Arrow I don't expect there to be a shortage in the short term. Even then, I'm going to dig out an old board and test with one of the new batch of parts before using them in the new run.
-- Rick
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