Watch out for well-made (counterfeit) chips

Solution is to buy part from eitheir manufacurer directly or if qty is not that big , buy from their authorized distributer . No authorized distributer will sell counterfit parts .

I doubt that recycling electronic components is ever cost effective unless done with extreme exploitation of the people removing the components and then exploitation of the people buying the components (the comps will never be fully re-tested and given a reliability probability distribution anything like the original parts).The losers will be the exploited recycling worker's health, the reputation of the manufacturer('s)OEM and component, and the end customer, the winner will be the fraudster. If an electronic component was labelled recycled would anybody buy it? If a new product was labelled "manufactured from recycled components" would anybody buy it? I think there is only a hypothetical green here. No kudos to the recycling.

Here we have had several instance of counterfeit parts. It was all due to the outside PCB assy house that we had used for many years. A this place got into financial trouble, they went out, not to authorized distributors, but to 'brokers' to buy parts. One of the most serious problems is when parts are cleaned. Many times the old parts are cleaned with chlorine bleach which leaches into the package to cause all sorts of havoc. Other than dead chips, we've had op-amps that oscillated under low capacitive loads, so borderline that we didn't see it until it got to the customer. We've had parts that we sea-water immersed, cleaned and remarked.

If you want to see a very honest and totally reputable recycler of electronics check out "Fair Radio". They offer "pulls", "used tubes", and my favorite, "used-repairable" equipment, meaning able to be repaired. So the bad part is in the counterfeiting and misrepresentation.
How about simply closing our borders to all the companies found to be counterfeiting, and publishing the details of what it was they were selling? Would it be possible to stop them? Would it be worth trying?

Counterfeit chips? Yes, not only counterfeit chips but a lot of products with inferior qualities that always fails in a days use. All source from China.

Hey Andy, Maybe you would like to be in an airplane when the control system fails, or on a ventilator that stops working and doesn't alarm because it was built with recycled components. his is not a good practice and I personally would never allow it in anything I build.

Thanks for all the great comments ... pro and con ... I will be showing this to my Business Ethics class......

As normal in China any thing goes. If they would poison their own kids with plastic additives to milk what makes you think they would have any problem doing this?

Stay out of electronics Andy. Take up politics or become a fireman.

So you buy NOTHING made in China then...you know, out of concern for your fellow man in that they have zero environmental standards and no OSHA to deal with? Sure. there's much worse than an open air fire over there.

Counterfeit parts are a huge liability for any company that develops critical electronics systems.
So much so that lives are often on the line as a result do to faulty, latently damaged parts.
I work in an industry that absolutely cannot tolerate these at all. In any form.
To suggest that parts perform better after thermal soak is not the same as putting them in a solder pot to remove them or removing them from a circuit card over a coal fire.
The second issue is that I personally would not want to support recycled parts the way it currently stands from the humanitarian standpoint.
What’s the life expectancy of the people that are removing these parts the way they do. The fumes and toxic release of gasses from the circuit cards is not even a concern right! As long as I can get some cheap parts. Has anyone even considered that? We should never support that. Destroying peoples health in other countries so we can buy cheap products is not ok.

2 things
1. Do not send all the ewaste to Asia to get recycled and sent back as new, this will help solve at least 50% of the problem ! (Both Eu and USA).
2. Purchasing officers shoudl now know not to buy from Asia/China !, they are the main cause of all this... use a good Domestic (or reputable) broker as they will know the strategies and systems to be able to ensure the parts are 100% good ir you do not pay/accept them.
Time and time again it is either the greed or desperation of the company that causes these problems but using a broker can prevent this !, a good broker is at least as good a tool if not better than a good Franchised disty !.
Just my 5 cents worth

Will this post ?

Some of you missed my point. If the parts are labeled as "recycled", they'll get used, caveat emptor, in an appropriate supply chain. Some devices actually reduce failure rate after a soak period - the classical bathtub curve, so failure rate arguments of recycled vs new may be bogus, especially for short life cycle consumer goods that wind up in the garbage dump. There is no mechanism under JEDEC to allow recycling to come above board and be legit. Yes, I agree that labeling them as "new" is criminal as fraud, but with no other distribution recourse, they go for the highest profit. A standard process for recycled parts, including test and ESD damage validation, would go a long way in waking up distributors to stock NEW parts...like in the good old days when they were actually providing a useful service....STOCKING parts. I've been in situation where there were 26 week leadtimes and would have WELCOMED anything that wiggled.
FWIW, we used to recycle RAMs off of large memory boards from a minicomputer...propane torch makes them fall out quickly...without heating the semiconductor device. When I first saw this, it was shocking, just like the image of a bonfire - it's not crude, it's actually better than a soldering iron....

YYY buying from chip manufacturers is nice if you are in need of 1MMM+ units. For other less unit hungry OEM's etc., a distributor is a necessity. So, the issue becomes one of finding and developing a relationship with an authorized distributor and *not* the vague on-line entity with the lowest price.

I like the comment above about having labeling wash off the device during the washing process. Labeling is only needed during manufacturing and leads not only to counterfitting as stated but also to reverse engineering of entire assemblies. Having labels wash off would be a great way to prevent both or at least discourage it from all but the most determined.

Lifetime in the industrial / commercial side of the marketplace is definitely an issue, one in which a counterfeit component can wreck havoc in a system. We received controller boards from our supplier that found it extremely difficult to obtain a RTC module readily available twenty years ago when the board was designed. Finally they were able to procure a quantity from a broker that normally they would not use. The parts all looked new, with silkscreen indicating a manufacturing date of 2009. However upon testing in application the controller boards were either not working or working intermittently. Troubleshooting had me focusing on the clock modules. Fortunately I had access to and the ability to take radiographic images of all the modules only to discover that their internal structure varied among four different die sets. This was evevn though they were labeled with identical date and manufacturing codes. I contacted the original manufacturer's support group and confirmed with them that the internal die sets, while made by them had not been in production for over a decade. So, in this instance the "counterfeiting" was taking old modules and relabeling them as newer modules without regard to testing for functionality. Had we not been doing a 100% audit on the boards at the time these would have made it into our service parts distribution and to customers around the world costing us untold money and good will to rectify. So, counterfeiting? By my definition yes but at a minimum it was deception and could have caused serious harm at customer sites. We have zero tolerance for this practice regardless of how you choose to label it.

This is a non-issue if you buy direct from the chip manufacturers. Of course no one want to mention it since the distributors could be cut off. I know that a big networking company only buy direct from the chip manufacturers. Pricing is one benefit. Getting the right parts is definitely key.

Watch out for chips that are genuine labelled, but are not what they promise. We got caught with a few tubes of microcontrollers that had been discontinued that were purchased from Asia. These were in a PLCC package.
Yep, the 'new' CPUs were used parts, and being an OTP device were not a lot of use to us. We didn't bother figuring out what the old application was, but it could have been interesting to get in touch with the previous owners.
This purchase was an act of desperation -- the manager had ignored our warnings of impending doom, and he was the author of the firmware (buggy as anything) and so was also the main reason we ran out of chips. We learnt the hard way - buying parts from grey distributors and having a boss actively involved in the product!

How about we keep this component recycling thing where it belongs: in the hobbyist's basement and the school lab. Seems those are suitable places where component failures can be tolerated and a "reduced" pricing is appreciated the most. But on new hardware that's sold with the consumer expectation that it contains new parts... NEVER!!! NEVER!!! NEVER!!!

Maybe Andy missed the point. If the people doing this were just honest tree huggers or budding entrepreneurs, they would simply sell the chips as used, end of story. Counterfeiting is a criminal act. These people don't care about recycling or the environment. The land where the chips are pulled becomes a large toxic wasteland polluting the local water supplies and crops. The workers pulling the chips live in squalor and work long hours for just a few dollars a day while the people selling these get rich. These parts do not have to meet any standards, they can windup anywhere and some unfortunately do.

Recycling used parts and counterfeiting has gotten so big that organized crime is involved. Why mess with drugs that can carry a death sentence when you can sell parts and risk a slap on the wrist.
Most recyling is done by holding a board over a wood fire until you can knock all of the parts off with one bang against a rock. The parts are cleaned up and sold as new. This is even worse than counterfeit duds because these may survive your test processes and become warranty failures that cause unhappy customers and loss of reputation.

SoCalTechGuy commented:
All cats look gray in the dark. With genuine parts scavenged, tested and cleaned up you may be OK - if you even know it. Many such parts enter production and are never found - unless failures occur. This game gets brisk in times of shortages. I recall the LS245 shortage when new parts were sold for $100 to makers in dire straights bought one and shipped a $10,000 machine. Scrap LS245s were salvaged all the time. Some even went to socketed parts. I have even seen kluges built up of 2 LS366 parts to ship those $10,000 machines, but I date myself.
Makers should make it hard for these guys by adding an area that washes out in the deflux cycle that would be hard to re-instate.

Have we read the same story? The story I read was about taking discarded electronics cleaning them up and then passing them off as NEW. Doesn't say anything about proper handling ( how could they have proper handing they were discarded). Doesn't say anything about going thru testing for proper functionality. The story is about greed and trying to scam the manufacturer. The story also describes a manufacturer who resorted to this source because the normal source were exhausted. Something most manufacturers can lose sleep over. Some call it green, I call criminal activity.

Andy, I don't think the problem is the 'recycling' it's the fraud of the misrepresented parts that's the problem. I don't even know how you can attribute it to greed. If you go to WalMart and see a product for $10 but it's $9 at Target will you buy it for $10 because you're not greedy? It's just smart money. It would be greed in the supply chain if they KNEW they were buying substandard parts but that's not the point of the story. In general the component OEMs would be happy to produce the quantity of parts the market needed if they KNEW about the demand. Operations like this filter that demand from the OEMs so they don't even know there's demand for their product.

Andy has a point, the problem is doing it properly so that the recycled part can be traced, and that adds cost. It could work, but the recycled parts would have to be very pricey parts to be cheaper after going through a 'real' recycling process that board manufactures would want to rely on.

Sorry Andy T, this is not recycling, this is claiming something that is untrue. When they are repackaged as new, but not tested, the seller is lying. Counterfeit is the appropriate term.
I could live with being able to buy "recycled" parts if 1) they were labeled and sold as such, 2) they were tested, 3) they were handled in a fashion that would not damage them and 4) the broker would guarantee them.
When a voltage reference (and what part doesn't have a device that is or acts like a voltage reference) gets exposed to high or prolonged temperatures, it gets knocked out of spec. Manufacturers would not discover these types of problems if the handling was benign.
Ask me how I know...

Andy, I get the "green" aspect of the whole thing. But I can't imagine any board manufacturer wanting to put a "green" component on a circuit board and risk a failure of the board. A new part has has pedigree that I can trace and depend on. A "Green" part is too cloudy as to it's reliability. Why risk a $100.00 board to save fifty cents on a "green" component.

Kudos on the recycling. We need to ENCOURAGE this and put an end to the whining. This kind of re-use is as green as it gets. Part number for part number, priced lower - which of course is how it gets into the greed supply chain in the first place (the greedy deserve what they get). Having an ANSI or JEDEC recognized "R" or something on the date code could identify the parts as recycled as an appropriate caveat emptor. With our ADHD consumer attention span that defines the life of most products as 18 months to two years, chip lifetime should be a non-issue. The "R" would identify the part as avoidable for those truly requiring 20-40 years of device lifetime.
I am, however, dead set against relabeling a true counterfeit - a newly fabbed part that is purported to have similar functionality, yet exploits a recognized brand or mask layout...THAT, and only that, should be a no-no.