Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot

https://zeptobars.com/en/read/Ti-555-NE555-real-vs-face-china-chinese

by BarsMonster • 9 years ago

194 99 9 years ago

problems3• 9 years ago

People buying 7 cent chips off Aliexpress and similar know full well that it ain't coming from TI and usually isn't labelled as such - it might be called an NE555 but make no mention of manufacturer and not have one labeled on the chip itself. Obviously finding a datasheet from a different manufacturer won't be applicable...

If you're buying those you're most likely using it for an application that isn't pushing its limits - they're great for experimenting with as a hobbyist or cranking your design to the lowest price possible if you're not on those limits.

BarsMonster2• 9 years ago

These fakes chips were labeled as Ti on the plastic package... They tried to make it look like real deal...

problems3• 9 years ago

Interesting, after doing some searching all listings I've looked at they either lack a logo or have a TI-ish logo but they don't mention it being a TI brand or genuine TI part in any way in the description - which is always a dead giveaway as if they do so they can be subject to punishment. Alibaba is actually pretty harsh on people selling known counterfeit goods and will ban sellers if they catch onto it - so I assume they don't mention it because their buyers don't care much and they don't want to get in shit for it.

kw713• 9 years ago

Mouser is selling TI NE555DR for $0.07 in quantity, so I am sure that TI's actual sale price is lower.

So, I think someone paying $0.07 on aliexpress is paying "full price" for something less, even if they rationalize they are getting a discount because they are not buying large lots (Buy only 100 at mouser and the cost goes up to $0.15, but for instance Arrow has a lower price than that for this quantity)

Freak_NL2• 9 years ago

AliExpress has another benefit though; zero to very low shipping costs.

In the EU buying electrical components at a hobbyist scale often means having to save up your purchases (e.g., €0,24 for the NE555 at Conrad) until you hit the minimum free shipping limit (in this case €20) or pay the full shipping (€4,95 in this example) for one little component.

AliExpress just has the better user experience if you are learning and experimenting (just buy a couple of spares and be prepared to switch to genuine stuff when needed).

jerkstate• 9 years ago

When I read this article I wondered, why would they knock them off and then sell branded goods at the rock bottom generic price? Then I clicked through a few more articles and it seems that the answer is so an integrator can "cost-optimize" your board and profit the difference between genuine and fake components, while you are none the wiser.

greglindahl3• 9 years ago

At the start of the ROHS era my startup was scrambling to get parts, and we bought some grey-market capacitors. Which turned out to be fakes. What a mess. It's all about the supply chain!

lamlam• 9 years ago

Fakes in which sense? Fake as in they were duds and didn't work, or fake as in they weren't from the specified manufacturer?

zik• 9 years ago

Here's an example of a fake electrolytic capacitor bought on the gray market: http://www.discovercircuits.com/dc-mag/Issue_4/Photos/FakeCa...

greglindahl3• 9 years ago

They were so far out of spec that we had to rework all of the boards with genuine caps.

wyager• 9 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the knock-off chips that are just a piece of copper connecting all the pins. I wonder why they bother with the copper, instead of just using a block of plastic.

jotux2• 9 years ago

I worked for a huge company with their own manufacturing in China. We did a beta run of a product and they used some black market components for a TI regulator. When we got the boards the output was dead on the regulator so we sent it to TI. They x-rayed the part and it was just an empty plastic package.

rasz• 9 years ago

Even Apple was forced to deal with glued fake plastic capacitors. iMac times, “Oral History of Arthur “Art” Astrin”, wifi pioneer: https://youtu.be/Tj5NNxVwNwQ?t=1h34m

dfox• 9 years ago

The package pins start as one piece copper stamping (called leadframe) in order to ease handling and to guarantee correct alignment of the pins. The short between all the pins gets removed pretyy late in the packaging process when the die is actually mounted on to the leadframe.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

They may be dummy components specifically designed for testing board manufacturing processes, without using (more expensive) real parts with die in them.

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

I recognize that chip at the bottom of the article! That's a Hitachi HA17555, which was on Zeptobars just a few months ago[0].

[0] https://zeptobars.com/en/read/Hitachi-HA17555-555-timer

kw713• 9 years ago

Interesting I wonder what the history of this design is? And how Hitachi's (or their partner's) die really wound up being re-marked as TI? If the die is a Chinese produced copy, why did they keep the markings during retooling?

I wish photographs of the packages were presented also.

Edit: The other "not genuine" die has quite a few similarities and it looks like one inspired the other.

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

I swear I've seen the logo on that one somewhere as well, but I can't seem to recall or find it anywhere else.

lokedhs• 9 years ago

Could it be that the Hitachi in the picture is also a fake, based on the same design as the faked Ti?

simcop2387• 9 years ago

If it's copied, they likely copied it entirely because trying to remove bits of the lithography mask is expensive and time consuming. Since it's not normally scene there's no use in spending the time or money to change it if you can get the mask.

puncturevine• 9 years ago

It could be a die copy but it could also be a used HA17555 harvested from e-waste and remarked as NE555 with a fresh date code.

BarsMonster2• 9 years ago

Wow, nice memory! Even I missed that. That means HA17555 is most likely also fake.

em3rgent0rdr6• 9 years ago

Although the author calls these designs "fake", they do perform the same functionality, but just simply don't meet the voltage tolerance and noise resistance levels of higher grade designs. So they're more of a "knock-off", "counterfeit", "imitation", or "derivative".

xupybd• 9 years ago

They are fake because they use the same name. Kinda like fake Nikes are still shoes but clearly fakes.

em3rgent0rdr6• 9 years ago

ok. Sorry I had to look up the definition of fake: "not genuine; counterfeit". So I guess fake is valid in this case. I was thinking fake meant "not real" or that it didn't actually do the same functionality.

DanBC2• 9 years ago

What's the difference between "counterfeit" and "fake"?

These devices are sold as TI parts, and sold as matching all the TI specs.

They are not TI parts, and they don't match the TI specs.

As the OP says, if these had been sold as "CN555" there wouldn't be a problem, everyone would know that they're not real TI parts.

andrewstuart• 9 years ago

The layouts look like a rogue/nethack level or maybe some new version of pacman.

speedplane3• 9 years ago

This is only half the story. The chips discussed in the article do the basic function advertised, but may not have the same tolerances as the genuine chip. But there are other types of counterfeits out there.

When we "recycle" our e-waste, much of it ends up in large landfills in China, where very poor workers melt down old boards, remove chips, and sort them by size and pin count. They then use a machine to scrub off the label and print on a new label of whatever part they want to market (usually obsolete parts that can't be bought from the original manufacturer). These end up in the supply chain of even reputable distributors. Amazingly, some of these counterfeits have made there way into military equipment, and as a result, there's a whole division of Homeland Security that conducts tests on suspect computer chip shipments entering the US.

jfries• 9 years ago

Do you mean we end up with a labeled chip whose insides are something completely different, and so won't ever work? Surely that doesn't happen this way. It must be many times cheaper to just buy empty packages than to clean up old ones?

kw713• 9 years ago

Yes there are known instances of parts being remarked as something completely unrelated.

speedplane3• 9 years ago

It definitely happens.

I suspect they do it this way rather than manufacture empty packages because there are a huge variety of chips out there with an equally diverse set of package designs. It's easier to pay unskilled laborers to sort chips into 200 different groups based on size, color, and pin count than to build a machine to replicate 200 different package types.

honestoHeminway5• 9 years ago

The worst part actually is, when those chips are the correct ones- but have been used and have all the wear. Means, you have them baked on and off board, slight overcurrent damages, wear on internal flash and Elektromigration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

And this chip is integrated into your new device. The only way to avoid this, would be a standard start of life vault, that is writeable once with the date and burns of the pathway to to re-write after that.

joshvm• 9 years ago

There are more incipient problems. We've recently had an issue where some CCDs - readily available from China - work just as they're supposed to, but have some weird surface coating that causes interference effects. The up to date models, bought from a reputable distributor (e.g. Digikey et al) seem to work fine and look physically different.

It's not clear whether the ones you can buy on eBay or Aliexpress are simply older models (and the manufacturer then removed this coating), or are actually knock-offs. We have no way of really knowing.

It was a good lesson: most of the time it's just not worth it especially if you're not chasing pennies on your product margin.

_fizz_buzz_• 9 years ago

Do you have a source for that, how do you know that? That sounds like an urban legend to me.

speedplane3• 9 years ago

Not an urban legend, it's been well publicized, here's a whole congressional hearing on it (warning, it's long): https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112shrg72702/pdf/CHRG-112...

Not good enough, here's a few more, but there is plenty else out there: http://www.ibtimes.com/why-pentagon-finding-counterfeit-chin...

http://www.combatcounterfeits.com/gallery.htm

VLM• 9 years ago

Personal experience having purchased random TO-3 packaged transistors from ebay labeled as LM323K voltage regulators to repair old hardware. Its "well known" in the retrocomputing hobby.

Ironically SOME sellers on ebay are legit, and some sellers are legit sometimes, so if you play a statistical game buying from ten sellers at a 50th the price of legit on-shore sellers, you still save money. Obviously its a lot simpler to build a temporary test fixture for a 70s linear voltage regulator than a memory chip or obscure CPU support chip, LOL.

danmaz74• 9 years ago

A circuit board where you replace one of the specified chips with a completely random one which only has the same pin count won't pass even basic QA controls something like what, 99% of the time?

As another commenter said, smells like an urban legend.

DanBC2• 9 years ago

By the time the device gets to QA[1] the money has already been paid to the counterfeiter, and it's going to be hard to get that money back.

Someone will lose money, but it's not going to be the counterfeiter.

contingencies• 9 years ago

Actual title is "Ti NE555 - real vs fake : weekend die-shot".

Current title "Chinese fake microchips hit rock bottom with 7¢ Ti NE555" is bad IMHO.

chiph2• 9 years ago

I dunno. It seems pretty descriptive to me. It identifies the source of the fakes (China), the product being counterfeited (the venerable 555 Timer), and the price they're being sold at.

I found this on eBay - 100 pcs of thru-hole 555's for $3.29 (3.2 cents each) with the TI logo printed on them. They say brand new and unused - but that's just not possible at that price.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/100PCS-NE555P-NE555-DIP-8-SINGLE-BIP...

lightedman• 9 years ago

"They say brand new and unused - but that's just not possible at that price."

I just picked up 500 LM555s from RadioShack - 50 cents for the entire batch.

They weren't joking when they said "No Offer Refused" for their closeout.

jabberwockwock• 9 years ago

This is why companies need services like TexPlained.

http://hardwear.io/olivier-thomas.php

laydn• 9 years ago

In one of our board designs, we were using a well-known manufacturer's 25Mhz oscillator, to provide a clock to a gigabit Ethernet PHY. When we wanted to assemble the boards, we could not find this oscillator in any official distributor, so we bought them from a vendor in China, who had some in stock.

When we assembled the boards, none of the boards functioned properly. There was no Ethernet connectivity, the PHY wasn't working

We contacted the "well known manufacturer" and provided photos of the part and they confirmed that the oscillator was not theirs. It was a counterfeit part.

The "counterfeit" oscillator actually did provide a clean 25Mhz clock, but the PHY did not work.

It amazes me there are companies out there that produce counterfeit silicon. I wonder what's their profit margin?

hollander• 9 years ago

It amazes me there are companies out there that produce counterfeit silicon. I wonder what's their profit margin?

Enough. Or: enough to make a living.

Nexxxeh• 9 years ago

The "counterfeit" oscillator actually did provide a clean 25Mhz clock, but the PHY did not work.

Did you find out why?

vardump• 9 years ago

Very interesting, more details, please. This matches one case I've heard about.

Who is the well known manufacturer being counterfeited? Abracon? How did the fake crystals look like?

Which PHY is it in question?

raverbashing3• 9 years ago

The 555 is probably simple enough so that the "fake" version (which several times is just an alternative version from a different manufacturer) works as well as the original one

ajnin• 9 years ago

They probably work but probably not within the same maximum/minimum ratings as the original chip. Your design might need a max frequency, or a minimum operating voltage, or a certain current-driving capability etc. that the fake chip cannot provide, causing the final product to fail when the design prototype worked fine. There are many variants of the 555 with wildly varying characteristics, not all are interchangeable.

nfriedly• 9 years ago

I bet there could be an actual business model of recycling components from e-waste. Obviously it'd require more QA work than what the counterfeit "recyclers" do, but, with enough automation, I bet you could structure it so that you at least break even on the e-waste disposal side, and then any resold components become pure profit.

dis-sys• 9 years ago

When I was working for a microprocessor company (which you use everyday) many many years ago, they were selling this JTAG debugger for a few thousand $ each. The cpu architecture was booming in China at that time, but that $ figure is not something people can afford. Clones started to flood the market pretty fast, a typical clone set you back for a few hundred $, that was already 1/10 of the original price.

However, that was still considered too expensive - then there was this vendor in Shanghai which came up a clone they sell for around $100 - after talking to them via some unofficial channels, we figured out that they had people stationed in those electronics dump sites to source the chips required. In those place, you don't pay for each chip, you pay for a kg price, e.g. I want 10kg of that chip, how much each kg please?

10+ years on, those engineers who first studied that CPU architecture back then using those cloned JTAG debugger are now pretty experienced/better paid, they are probably the ones complaining fake/reused chips on some Chinese forums claiming they are the victims.

the-dude• 9 years ago

So why did ARM charge an arm and leg?

pkaye• 9 years ago

The problem with faking chips is that the victims maybe out of a warranty claim later when they find a problem. Also there might be subtle differences which will only be found when in full production. For a cloned JTAG debugger the risks are lower since they are used in low volumes. Personally I think they it is okay to clone or reuse chips but don't claim to be the original manufacturer. It is quite easy to relabel chip with your own imprint.

kbaker• 9 years ago

I think a bigger problem with the 'chips by the kg' mindset, is that there is zero incentive and zero funding to develop good software to go along with the hardware.

Companies who are successful have spent way more time in ensuring that their software works reliably with their debuggers, across a wide range of chips and platforms. Sure it's expensive, but everything just works.

By 'stealing' this software in this way, cloning firms are dragging the entire industry down with the clones that don't work 100%, or the IoT devices that get infected due to lack of any security. I'm really hoping some certification body like UL, or major distributor like Amazon or Alibaba, steps in and starts ensuring at least a basic level of quality for hardware and software.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

That means our HA17555 was also fake.

Alternatively, it means that "G1083" was actually a remarked HA17555.

The "dotted X" logo on the other one I've seen before, but can't remember the name.

Hasz• 9 years ago

Instead of pointing out the die layout, how about a rigorous test? Let's see clock accuracy, power consumption, etc vs the original TI part.

ksk• 9 years ago

What are your thoughts on people not respecting Intellectual Property rights? Will it lead us down a path of gridlock where nobody is going to create anything new for fear of someone else using their work without payment/credit? Also, why is using someones creative output or deriving from it OK in some fields (like applied sciences) but not in others? (Here I'm not including the people who claim others' work as their own, merely people who clone)

Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot

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