On 08/24/2017 11:16 AM, W2HX via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I would think the most logical explanation for this chip was not that someone went through the trouble of trying to pass off one chip for another, but rather that the manufacturing process simply put the wrong label on the chip. That would seem to me way more plausible than some kind of intentional subterfuge for a low demand chip in the first place.
That may seem to be more plausible on the surface, but that's not what's going on. As far as selling fake 74LS189s, look at it this way. Try not to apply American labor economics to the situation. There's a market for 74LS189s. It's a very small one, but it does exist. A Chinese businessman comes across a few hundred thousand completely useless chips, like DTMF generators. A few searches on completed eBay listings tells him which 16-pin DIPs sell and which ones don't. Chip labeling equipment is easily reconfigured on the fly (think date codes), so he makes a few hundred "74LS189s" and puts them on eBay. And a few hundred of these, a few hundred of those...and of whichever ones sell, he makes more. And while he's putting them on eBay, he's also shopping them around to companies that perform equipment repairs, to the military parts channels (through a front), etc. Just think of what you could do in business if you had access to a labor pool that is endless and essentially free, all of the cast-off equipment that American corporations are liquidating when they shut down factories, government subsidies, lots of greed, and a complete lack of scruples. That's half of the businessmen in China today. This is all extensively studied, well-documented, and is not a new problem. It is a very large problem in the electronics industry today, and not just because of occasionally inconveniencing a hobbyist. We have fake components getting into military supply chains by the tens of thousands. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA