BOGUS ELECTRONIC PARTS （1）

Published:2011/8/3 19:55:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

Beware of fakes!

By Harry Baggen

The forgery of expensive brand-name products is an easy way to make some money quickly. Lots of products, anything from T-shirts to watches that strongly resemble the original are offered for sale, particularly in Asia, for ridiculously low prices. In recent years, even electronic components are being copied. From the outside they are indistinguishable from the original, but on the inside they are pure fake. This can have nasty consequences when you solder one in your circuit!

Forgery of brand-name products has been a phenomenon for a long time. Everyone will have heard the holiday stories where you can buy a ’real’ Rolex on the beach for just 5 pounds! It is too good to be true... But it is not only with clothing, handbags and watches that shady factories and slippery individuals try to make easy money at the expense of someone else’s reputable name. These days, counterfeiters go much further. Everything that can earn money is a potential target for the forgery industry.

A very serious problem in the area of copied parts is fake parts for aircraft, so-called bogus parts. Aircraft parts have to comply with very stringent quality demands and are quite expensive as a consequence. A very attractive market for forgers, who will refurbish old parts or will attach other brand names to cheap parts in order to sell them on for a lot of money. But such fake parts can cause serious problems if they are used in or on an aeroplane. Experts have attributed several accidents in recent years to such ’bogus parts’.

The counterfeit parts turn up in all sorts of areas: clothing, watches, bank notes, pharmaceuticals, foods, toys, sunglasses, automotive parts, computer software and electronic components.

This problem is not just something that started in recent years, but has existed at least since the seventies. In 1981 a scandal was uncovered where millions of fake contraceptive pills were distributed, with all the consequences resulting from that. Now you can only smile about these things. Much more serious are fake aorta pumps for open-heart surgery, your life is then really hanging by a thread!

Even the space organization NASA can’t avoid the problem. They started legal proceedings last year against a company for supplying fake connectors.

In the electronics area you may remember the issue with fake capacitors on PC motherboards, a few years ago [1]. Even motherboards from reputable brands were fitted with electrolytic capacitors of very poor quality (but with the label of a well known manufacturer) that gave up the ghost after a very short time by exploding or by leaking the corrosive internal fluid all over the PCB. Recently there was a problem with fake batteries for GSM mobile phones, which reportedly had a risk of exploding. This did not only involve batteries from unknown brands, but also fake batteries on which the labeling would indicate that they came from the ’official’ manufacturers.

Experts suspect that most of these counterfeit parts originate in Asia, or China in particular. The damage caused by this is estimated to be several billion pounds (just for the electronic components). Because of the strongly growing industry and the increase of chip manufacturing facilities in China this is likely to increase significantly in the future. A good overview of recent counterfeit products can be found on the website for Design chain Associates [2J. There are a number of organizations worldwide that occupy themselves with fighting the ’counterfeit terror’, such as the IACC (International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition) [3].

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