On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 02:04 -0400, solarwind wrote: > On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:34 AM, Forrest Christian wrote: > > Be careful as I (and others) have received counterfeit parts from them. > > In my case it was nearly 200 L6202's which they to this day have not > > taken care of. I wish they would have done the correct thing and taken > > them back and/or given me a refund/credit. But instead they pretended > > that there wasn't really a problem. It's too bad too, since I do > > like their prices but just can't bring myself to purchase from someone > > who sells counterfeit parts as original. > > > > (And no, I don't know if they thought they were counterfeit or not - > > quite frankly, it doesn't matter to me since they basically quit > > responding to my emails trying to get a resolution to the issue). > > Hey, what exactly are "counterfeit" parts and how do you know which > ones are counterfeit and which ones are not? Depends. The simplest cases are binned parts being sold as "new", or stolen parts sold as new. I've heard of some people actually taking parts off of old boards, reballing them (in the case of BGA) and selling them as new (obviously this only makes sense for expensive parts). I've even heard of some cases where parts are relabeled with a more expensive part number, change a few numbers on say an MCU (many MCUs have multiple parts in the same package, so if you take an MCU with 2k RAM and label it as if it were a part with 64k RAM you can sell it for more). For cheaper parts there are some manufacturers that make parts and then label them with a "brand" name, exactly the same stuff as what happens with designer purses. In general it's safest to buy parts from authorized distributors, but even they can be caught with bad parts. As for how YOU can tell, it's exactly the same as designer purses: sometimes it's obvious (name is mispelled), sometimes "experts" can't tell it's a fake. TTYL -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist