Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527276
OCTOBER 2024 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 19 ker. Around the same time, the folks in the vehicle factories would go online, find parts, then alert the buyers. at's when it got really ugly. People who had the best intentions but didn't know the complexities of the electronics industry were direct buyers to get parts from all different channels. You were being directed to buy parts from some- where, but these parts weren't verified? Everybody meant well, but it was hard to con- trol. I remember when the first components started failing. In-circuit and functional tests on the controllers had all passed. However, once they had the final application payload, they started to fail. At this point, we asked, "Why are these things failing?" When it happened, I was in Europe doing obsolescence work. Reading these emails, I realized, "is could be bad. I think these are counterfeits." e confirmation came when we sent the manufacturer a picture of the label and the part. ey said, "is is not one of our date or manufacturing codes. at's not one of ours." I was on a train to the airport at 3 a.m. to get back to the home office. When I returned, I went to my colleague's analysis lab. As we looked at this part, another engineer said, "Here are those FET parts that are failing." We grabbed a picture of that part, sent it to that manufacturer, and they said, "at's not our part." At that point, with two known counterfeits in our factory, we stopped everything. We had to audit everything in inventory to find what was purchased as a brokered part—over 100 part numbers and greater than 10 million parts. Once we had them all contained, we had to validate them. I'll never forget working over 40 days straight over the holiday season to lead the evaluations. It was an activity I never want to repeat. One of our most eye-opening examples was related to multi-layer ceramic capacitors. e labels looked perfect in these cases, except the secret decoder numbers weren't quite right. We only found this out by working directly with the component manufacturer to review the labels, who told us they weren't legitimate labels. We learned through these activities that most companies selling ceramic capacitors use contract manufacturers companies to make MLCCs according to their recipe. When the CMs run an order for, say, 100 million parts, they might get 110 million, depending on their yields. e customer company accepts only the 100 million ordered. Now, this CM is sitting on 10 million surplus parts, so they sell them. ey end up in the hands of people who can replicate the label and sell them as legitimate parts. Technically, they are legitimate parts, but they don't move through the regular chain. e manufacturer code for these other parts is correct, but all the parts from the 100-million- part order are accounted for.