Ti NE555 – real vs fake: weekend die-shot
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.