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Counterfeit Detection
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
BY David Bernard, Ph.D., Dage Precision Industries, A Nordson Company
As electronic devices and components become more expensive and obsolete, it is an unfortunate reality that users are ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous dealers in counterfeit components. However carefully your supply chain is configured, the necessities of providing customers with their products in a timely fashion, combined with the ease of Internet searches, often leads you or your suppliers onto the grey market.
Although best practice always should be obtaining components only from trusted and reputable sources of supply, the reality of the market pressures listed above means that your trusted suppliers cannot always provide what you need, when you need it. Therefore, you do the same as your attentive suppliers do or as well as everyone else wanting the same item, and turn to the Web to source what you need. Sadly, this is what counterfeiters are waiting for you to do.
Now that you have no choice but to look outside the known supply routes, suspicion must become the watchword. This is true even when receiving grey market items from your regular suppliers. Of course, with expensive components of a few hundred dollars each, high value demands extra vigilance at all times. It is natural to put in all the additional tests and quality assurance steps to vet these items before they are used. Unfortunately, much lower value devices are also being counterfeited.
Less Than $10 Counterfeit Components
Such inexpensive devices on the counterfeit trade are the most dangerous to your business and your reputation. This is because the wily counterfeiter can often supply a small quantity of real items for quality verification or sometimes include a small number of real components at the head of the reel. In addition, reel-based surface mount components are often not checked prior to placement, so a simple trick for the counterfeiter is to re-label the entire reel. Many plastic components are moisture sensitive; if the items arrive in a specially-packaged, moisture-proof bag, most board-level assemblers do not check inside the package for fear of exposing the components to ambient moisture. As a result, as long as the external label has the correct information, this is often sufficient to have the counterfeit components accepted.
Even if analytical checks on a few components off the end of the reel appear to be fine, it can generally not be afforded to check samples from every reel at incoming inspection, especially when the unit cost is low. Because of this reality, inexpensive counterfeit components can enter the production floor readily. The same is true for similar items purchased through the legitimate supply chain – your supplier cannot always guarantee checking every low-value item they obtain on your behalf through the grey market without dramatically increasing costs. Again, as the component value is small, it does not raise suspicion.
Figure 1. Optical image of the termination of good and counterfeit ultra-fast diodes, and X-ray images of aluminum wire connections at the leg of the good and counterfeit ultra-fast diodes.
In many cases, over-molding and exterior markings on good and on counterfeit components look very similar. Often a detailed optical examination can reveal a difference in the cut termination of the counterfeit item. If the device costs less than $10, it often only merits a cursory inspection. However, further X-ray inspection reveals telling differences. For example, two items in Figure 1 show that, in addition to the differences mentioned above, the aluminum wire count and bonding also varied.
Because of the relatively low component cost and the high cost of verification, such low-value counterfeit components are the most insidious once they escape into production. This is because once they are assembled onto the board, the presence of a low-value counterfeit is not the first or the easiest issue that will be considered as determining the root cause of bad products.
Fighting Back
With a quick visual inspection often being the main acceptance test for low-value components, especially when undertaken without a microscope, counterfeit components can easily pass since the serial number and other printed information appears to be correct. It should be noted that it is relatively easy for a counterfeiter to “black top,” or paint the device and reprint other details upon it.
The route from component manufacturer to end-user often is long and can go through many hands legitimately, so there are many inroads for a counterfeiter to get their fakes into the system. Having a certificate of conformance is no guarantee; externally, the counterfeits look like the real item and a swap could have been made at some point in the supply chain. Also, if the counterfeiter is capable of re-printing details on the devices themselves, then forging a certificate of conformance to pass visual inspection is equally simple.
If everything appears to be correct on the outside, then the question remains, what are the opportunities for inspecting the inside of the components? It is possible to remove the lid from some packages as well as dissolve away the plastic molding compound from others. However, such tests are, by their very nature, destructive and even if the tested components in a mixed batch are fine then they are now unusable. With a mixed batch of items it is impossible to test every item in such a way. Therefore, non-destructive tests are required, ideally those that are quick and simple to perform.
X-ray Inspection
With the use of a good quality digital X-ray inspection system that provides high magnification at oblique views and a large greyscale sensitivity, it is possible to quickly and easily see inside the suspect packages nondestructively. By taking images of known good samples that clearly indicate the correct wiring and subassembly alignment within the packages, production operators and incoming inspectors can quickly compare suspect devices to qualified specimens (Figure 2).
Figure 2. X-ray image of counterfeit device that has no die or wire bonding contained inside.
If all is well, then these items can be passed directly for production use. However, if something is wrong, these counterfeits have been prevented from contaminating future production, and tests were made with the components still within their original packaging and without breaking any security seals. In this way, these suspect items can be rejected and compensation demanded.
Other Inspection Techniques
X-ray fluorescence (XRF) allows components to be checked nondestructively for their chemical composition, in particular detecting the presence of lead in what may have been supplied as supposedly lead-free. Infrared microscopy allows selected surfaces of die and bond sites to be examined without removing the molding compound and exposing the top surface of the die (Figure 3). This leaves the bond sites intact for possible electrical test. However, component preparation requires grinding to access the surface of the silicon.
Figure 3. Infrared microscope image.
Solvent body softening, component de-lidding, and jet or plasma etching also can be used to carefully remove component surfaces for further optical examination against a known good component. However, a quick check with X-ray inspection, even while the components are still on the reel, can achieve the same results by exposing the insides of the good and counterfeit packages (Figure 4). Therefore, X-ray inspection can nondestructively discriminate between good and bad components without laborious and time-consuming testing.
Figure 4. X-ray images of good and counterfeit DAC showing variation inside two identical packages.
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Conclusion
Counterfeit components are a real issue. Unfortunately, they are not just copying expensive devices but more insidiously very-low-value items. It is difficult to quantify how big a problem counterfeiting is, but it has been suggested its impact could be as much as $10 billion annually. Adding X-ray inspection and other analytical techniques into acceptance procedures does add personnel, time, and money to the bottom line. But if it is not done, it can result in counterfeit components being used on production boards where the real cost of fixing the problem in terms of repair, reputation, and potential lost future business can be enormous.
David Bernard, Ph.D., product manager X-ray systems, Dage Precision Industries, a Nordson Company, may be contacted at d.bernard@dage-group.com.