Fake Chips

 There really are people who sell fake chips.  They might not know that they are fake but obviously someone along the supply chain knew they were fakes.

I blame the recent uptick in IC fakes on laser marking.  It's relatively easy for someone to connect a laser marker to a PC and generate a pretty convincing mark on an IC.

However sometimes they slip up.  An example:  the MC12080 prescaler chip.  This is an ECL chip meant to divide frequencies from say 200 MHz to 1600 MHz by a factor of 10 (other factors are pin programmable).  I used this chip in the Prescaler kit.

http://wb9kzy.com/prescalr.htm

The real chips are from onsemi which used to be ON Semiconductor (and was originally part of Motorola) and look like this (this one is from Mouser):

When viewed from farther back there is what appears to be a white stripe on the left, it's really just 6 vertical lines "drawn" by the laser marker.

But I've tried some of the ebay vendors of this chip and gotten something similar to this:

But no "stripe" on the left - the logo on the left is what I *think* is supposed to be a Freescale semi arrow logo.  

the Freescale Semiconductor logo

Now  onsemi and Freescale Semiconductor were both spun off from Motorola.  However onsemi is the only one who makes the MC12080 prescaler chip.  So the chip counterfeiter picked the wrong logo, whoops !  BTW, Freescale produced the microprocessors by Motorola and got rolled into NXP semiconductor.

The weird thing is that the fake marking looks as good or better than the real marking :)  But believe me, solder that fake chip into a kit and it won't work.

Generally it's possible to get your money back from ebay on something like this but think of the time spent.  It's better to pay more and buy from Digi-key or Mouser or some other "real" distributor.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm