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Fake Burr Brown OPA627

The first copy I remember coming across was a TDA IC. Different format than above but the same process, old numbers rubbed off and the then newly obsolete number reprinted, must have been around 1984.

Strangely there was no hike in price for the fake and I think all of the big suppliers were importing from the same place at the time and got burned.
 
I remember in the 80's when fake maths coprocessors were a "thing." Also fake intel memory chips. I was working for a computer products distributor at the time, and even we got burnt a few times (although the buying team were a dodgy bunch of people, I seem to remember).
 
Mike P said:
The OPA627 on the left looks OK but a scrub with some acetone reveals that it has been sanded to remove the original part number, blacked and then remarked with the OPA627 part number.
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Just to make sure I understand, are both ICs from the same source, and you unmasked one of them? Or is one real and one fake? Can you tell what the original part number was?
 
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booja30 said:
Just to make sure I understand, are both ICs from the same source, and you unmasked one of them? Or is one real and one fake? Can you tell what the original part number was?
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They're from the same source and both fake, the photo is a sort of before and after.

They are single opamps of some sort because they do work as such but I can't tell what they are.
 
Gotta say they've done a REALLY good job on that reprint, must have genuine laser markers and only the alignment of the date/batch code looks wrong (only because it's not aligned to the right edge of the part number).
 
In my example the chips were used in the hundreds of thousands of cheap branded portable TVs that hit the UK and the world I guess in the early eighties along with a small zener diode they used to blow all the time, (the make Orion springs to mind but the chassis’s were all almost identical) so I guess some enterprising folks thought the could make a few yen re stamping the chips.
There was such a huge demand via the secondary suppliers I’m thinking they’d have had a huge pre order book and then shipped them out over a short period of time before disappearing.

Lots of p.....d off customers who’s £119 tv was scrap!

Was there not a story of a manufacturer making vast quantities of faulty capacitors and dumping them on the market, again mid eighties I think.
 
It's quite a big thing in Defense manufacturing where circuit designs outlast chip designs and package styles by decades and they're left raking around looking for old stock.

Friend took on the 'Obsolescence Engineering' role to help ensure what was being purchased was the real thing. We shortened his title to 'Obsolete Engineer' of course, in the interests of morale (ours).

He did a good job though as none of the chips I did a physical F/A on for him were dodgy. A lot were so old they wouldn't solder under the production parameters and there was another industry where chips would be sent to get leads reformed and re-plated (particularly if Pb-free plated originally) so they could be used.
 
I once spoke with an audio manufacturer who made part of their kit in the Far East (for assembly elsewhere to legally say, ‘made in...’.
He said his ‘official authorised distributor’ in that country sold them fake BB chips as real.

So well faked in appearance that they had to measure all their kit when shipped back to their ‘country of assembly’ to identify the fake verse the real.

They realised they had sold a few pieces of kit with fakes and had to supply new chips to their network so their customers got the quality they paid for.

So buy from a ‘reputable’ dealer I suppose, one who checks their supply chain.
 
Reputable distributors won't be buying on the open market. Trouble starts when employees or the logistics/customs swap real for fake to resell the real parts elsewhere.
 
As JimmyB is intimating above the problem has become so serious that there is clandestine military stuff going on, new departments in parts provisioning etc, to prevent this shite getting used in fighter planes, early warning facilities, and others in medical/life sensitive equipment etc. it is not to be made lightly of!
 
Arkless Electronics said:
As JimmyB is intimating above the problem has become so serious that there is clandestine military stuff going on, new departments in parts provisioning etc, to prevent this shite getting used in fighter planes, early warning facilities, and others in medical/life sensitive equipment etc. it is not to be made lightly of!
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Yep close to starting WW3 at one time in 1980 IIRC it was National Semiconductor faking test data.


“President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.


Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at norad headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.”



https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake
 
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