4 ms·
From the end of the post: "Now, counterfeiters re-label RC4200 chips and sell them as the more-expensive AD633 multiplier." The counterfeiters are doing this n
by jecel 6y ago
From the end of the post: "Now, counterfeiters re-label RC4200 chips and sell them as the more-expensive AD633 multiplier."
The counterfeiters are doing this now, not in the 1970s. They just happen to be using a chip from 1978 since it is still available and cheap to impersonate a more recent chip that is more expensive.
My first encounter with counterfeit ICs was in the late 1980s. Though PCs had been designed to use memory with parity, nearly everybody turned off parity checking in the BIOS. That made it popular to sell DRAM SIMMs/DIMMs with 8 good memory chips and one bad one. Sometimes the ninth chip wasn't actually bad but just a cheaper one that was far slower than the other eight.
- ggm 6y agoTo get a 1978 ic, they had to have a board to prise it off, or unsold stock. I wonder if there is something in a chip leg, package or substrate which changes in desoldering, such that you can tell how many times it was repurposed.
- squarefoot 6y agoMy experience was a lot worse. Dated back in the mid 90s I believe. In a shop I was working with, came a lot of incredibly cheap PC mainboards where the CPU (386SX, IIRC) had been relabeled to 386DX, the static RAM cache chips on the mainboard were just no-die pieces of plastic with pins, absolutely identical to real chips but 100% empty, and of course soldered, then finally the BIOS EPROM was hacked to show a cache was present and other bogus values, but the chip was soldered so one couldn't easily reprogram it with a legit BIOS that would have revealed the scam. We later realized that the manufacturer was smart enough to use on the boards box and manuals the term "virtual cache", so noone could complain. Those boards indeed worked, although of course they were slow as dead sloths.