Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
26 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 to be discovered, we hope! It's very interesting to think of even the lowliest components being a risk to life. We need a solution that supports every material. There could be devices like that right now in driverless cars. The counterfeiter doesn't think about consequences. This is why it is so important for the industry to realize that investment in the secure supply chain is stra- tegic, that we have to be able to trust what we build. Today, almost everything we own or use has an electronic device in it. The industry has choices. We can embrace this reality and make the necessary upfront investment, and then start saving money, as we reduce once again the need for testing, the amount of rework and recalls. It pays off in the long run. Or we can put our head in the sand and wait for an event which will force us to do that, which likely will not be pleasant. Johnson: As you walked us through the first phases, I was struck by how little database management is required. You're describing a lot of very local inside-the-packaging work. It wasn't until you started talking about the semi- conductor actives that a large database to track the individual serial numbers came up in con- versation. It doesn't sound like this has to be a massive cloud-based database project to pro- vide supply-chain traceability, at least not for a majority of the parts. Ford: There are three elements to this. Inter- nal traceability collects a multitude of "big data" from across the operation, usually now through IIoT, following the requirements of whereby there is a circuit that, on initial power-up, creates a unique fingerprint identi- fier within the chip. Enrolling the ID into the secure database ensures that any device that requires absolute authentication of key semi- conductors can be done by linking back to the secure database, confirming the chip ID, and making sure that the chip has gone through all of the official procedures of manufacture and distribution. All stages of manufacture through semiconductor and assembly have links into the secure environment. Johnson: Essentially, you can do an authentic- ity check on all the activities in the system. Ford: Exactly. The problem that leaves, of course, is the continued rise in counterfeits, which has been traditionally in the semicon- ductor side but has moved to passive compo- nents, and so there is the need for the secure supply chain for all. One of the biggest issues recently was the counterfeiting of millions of ceramic condensers. A system on an aircraft failed when up in the air. After landing, all the tests on the system passed, but when it went up in the air again, it failed. The immediate thought was of a failure of the key semicon- ductor, but they were perfect. They eventually discovered that a key signal to the device was routed through a ceramic condenser, in which the dielectric was not of the right specifica- tion. It did not have the right properties; it was counterfeit. There were millions of these counterfeit com- ponents all over the world—most of them never