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66 SMT Magazine • January 2016 Motivation As a result of these pressures, the motivation to reduce material costs can encompass: • Vendor cloning: There are many choic- es of materials manufacturers, and some have better quality or consistent products, which are also more expensive. The golden rule is to select the level of quality needed at the lowest price available. Substituting lower cost materials in volume, however, can make a considerable fi- nancial difference. • Test failures: In testing materials dur- ing manufacture, some will inevitably fail. Electrical properties may fall outside of con- trol parameters, or stress testing may reveal weaknesses. These failures create an opportu- nity for individual materials, groups of materi- als, or even a whole batch of materials to be scrapped or re-packaged as cheaper versions. This may not represent a huge cost to the original manufacturer, but the opportunity to make some extra money could be a significant motivation to anyone else involved in dispos- al or recycling. • Trial materials: Materials made during the setting up of manufacturing processes, or samples generated, could also be intercepted in the disposal process and re-sold. • Dirty materials: It is not only in the material manufacture and supply-chain process that counterfeit materials can be introduced. Spoilage generated during assembly production can also be inappropriately used. For example, materials that have been rejected by the SMT processes and discarded may be gathered up and recycled back into the machine at a later time. The handling of these materials outside of the supply-chain rules introduces risk of con- tamination from dirt and water. In many situa- tions, refurbishing materials is acceptable, but in a situation where an acute shortage of ma- terials happens at the end of a production run because of unexpectedly high spoilage can be a great motivator to simply pick up discarded ma- terials and put them in a tray for re-use. These are also counterfeit because they deviate from the approved supply procedure. • "Garage" materials: Some materials are made specifically with the intent to replace au- thorized materials. The classic situation is an en- trepreneur who buys an out-dated manufactur- ing process that he sets up in a garage to churn out materials made with substandard raw mate- rials, often without testing. The intent is simply to make the materials as cheaply as possible and then find a way to introduce them as genuine materials in the supply chain. figure 1: evidence found of re-labeling an ic. THE EssEnTiAl pionEEr's surViVAl GuidE LOST In THE SySTEM