Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1527276
32 SMT007 MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2024 regard for the capacitance value, voltage, toler- ance, or other factors. ey were packaged on cheap paper tape and reel. For one company that came to ERAI, we helped them get some of their money back and gave them proper training on how to inspect incoming capacitors and other devices. We sent an alert to our member base across 44 countries. Everyone now has the opportunity to avoid this supplier. That seems to offer a lot of value to OEMs and brokers. I demonstrate our services to companies all over the world. Sometimes, I'll hear things like, "We don't have to worry about counterfeits because we don't deal with obsolete material." I can show them that in 2023, over half of the parts reported were not obsolete. ey were currently available from franchise distribution, direct from the factory, or the authorized supply chain. But there may have been long lead times. So, obsolescence is one of the driving factors, but not the driver for a counterfeit device. That is an important point that was certainly driven home during the pandemic. Another point of interest is that of all the geo- graphic locations with known suppliers of a high average selling price—TI, Xilinx, the field programmable gate arrays, and things like that are very expensive parts. Unfortunately, counterfeiters have raw material in abundance in scrap boards to remark it and sell it back to us. If you break it down by component type, it is the same story. Analog ICs, microprocessors, memory, and programmable logic are typi- cally expensive. When you get down to resis- tors, they're low cost, so you don't see much counterfeiting. From 2000 to 2018, the number one most reported counterfeited device was an integrated circuit. It wasn't until 2019 that we saw, for the very first time, that shied to an inexpensive chip capacitor because there was a global shortage driven by electric vehicles, laptops, and cell- phones. At the same time, the industry was trying to move its customers from large case- size parts to smaller case-size parts, so a lot of manufacturing capacity was moved to these newer, smaller devices. All that created a per- fect storm of extremely long lead times and companies desperately needing product. For the counterfeiters, this was really sim- ple. ey could create premium prices because of the high demand and long lead time. ey could melt these parts off the millions of scrap PC boards and sort them by case size, with no Figure 4: Geographic location of known suppliers of parts reported in 2023.