Welcome to the ugly world of counterfeit and mislabeled parts. This is a problem that is affecting all industries. "Caveat emptor" is the only true response I can offer. Fortunately, the electronics arena has a slight advantage to other engineering fields for detecting malfunctioning components. Think of the difficulty a mechanical engineer has verifying the sheer load of a Cat4 bolt. Doing the non-destructive testing of the output voltage of a linear regulator permits testing of all components to be used. To my knowledge, bolt testing requires testing a sacrificial sample lot.

Frequently the vendor that you purchased your parts from was also duped, so don't automatically blame them. I should also bend over backwards a little more and remind you that all manufacturers can and do occasionally make honest mistakes.

But if you manufacture zero fault tolerance systems, relying on vendor warranty certificates on parts will burn you every time. You can hire an outside firm to test and verify parts before assembly, but this is still trying to pass the responsibility off to the wrong group. If you require flawless material, in house testing is the only responsible method.

I agree, that trusting best manufacturer and their data sheet is not enough as problems can be engineers working in best companies also that can lead to inferior parts at the outlet. Some engineers accelerate production to get higher wages counted per lot they produce. This has been frequently noticed in mechanical parts when CNC is made to run at higher speed to fabricate parts leading to poor quality product due to faster run. Company asked to me to monitor each run of the CNC machine which they think was tempered with by man who want to produce all work in short time in night when he is alone and then he could sleep by putting the machine off. Companies in trouble can easily push poor quality parts as genuine to survive and then the casual user suffers. Also we have to put extra cost for testing.

Can certified parts be trusted as genuine is another big question? If not then why to pay more for these?

I am right now discussing precision resistances with Vishay collaborative company and have to pay for each parts nearly 1000 times more than normal parts available in the market and then again if I have to do all that testing and not to trust the manufacturer then what is fun in paying 1000 times.

Gresham's Law about bad money driving good money out of the market needs a corollary for electronic components. Ref. the rash of bad electrolytic capacitors coming out of China. I've had several compact fluorescent lamps fail after about four months (well shy of the predicted two+ years) and every one had a bulging and ruptured capacitor.

I think low price tag has become a serious problem to China and they compromise with quality. For some manufacturers, even if you pay more you will get same bad quality as they do not have any better process. There are too many manufacturers and trader out there and no idea of who can be trusted. China has lots of money to buy most of the manufacturing companies of the west to give them bad name in just one shot.

Creating a test facility for all components is a real problem. How do I do life cycle testing for these? It is like asking you to test every drug you buy before start taking them. I don't think any one does that. At best you go for a brand name and pay more for it. That is all.

Price tag 1/10 makes temptation in attitude to try out parts from all corners and then you have entire system cashing out due to one bad part in it. Another problem is that paying more has no guaranty that things will work and that is an insult to injury.

"Men at some time are masters of their fates:(145)
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

For those of you who do not recognize the quotation, this is from one of Cassius' speeches in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, Act 1 Scene 2.

If you based your product warranty on MTBF values implied but not warranted by a component manufacturer or vendor then tough noogies. If the component MTBF numbers are warranted, you may now need to prove systemic flaws in the components to force warranty compliance. If you are unwilling or unprepared to determine if this is a systemic flaw and not an honest mistake (likely an honest mistake will be quickly corrected by the vendor) then again, tough noogies. You or more accurately your company are one of a cluster of middle men providing a product to a customer. Most importantly, you are the last middle man in the process to fabricate this product for a customer. If you do not inspect and test at least an appropriate sample lot of components to the standards you based your warranty on, then your company and not your vendors are at fault. If an unacceptable volume of poorly made products get past your Quality Assurance process, then your company's QA needs to be improved in some aspect.

The problem comes always down to you've built and sold an inferior product. Palming off responsibility onto earlier vendors and manufacturers shows a real lack of integrity. This lack of integrity is likely why Vishay wishes to charge you 1000 times their normal price. If they will be held responsible for all of your bad judgements, they want your profit.

Quality and price tag perhaps go together and they also some time decide if good product or bad product will reach the destination. Some people keep on asking for low price, and expect high quality also and I think there is this problem.

For one of my regular client, another person quoted 1/3 price for very high quality product and they could not resist and accepted that offer. Obviously they will get what they are paying for.

I looked at prices of these small parts, voltage regulators from different sources and wondered why they are so different in prices. National Semiconductor 5V regulators comes for about 5$ while many other make are sold for 0.1$. At times these 0.1$ also work with so-so specifications but in long run they may be serious problem and can not be trusted.

Getting rid of bad stock is also a problem. I know which part is not good or is real bad and have to discard these out immediately else they may get into production line any time.

Then there is this life time of the products. Some products have date mark and many don't. I found Tantalum capacitors pissing every now and then in the circuits and do not know how to reply on them for their life. They work initially and all of a sudden they go smoking guns. I wanted them to filter noise and for 24V power I placed 35V rated version and even then they were out unfaithful to me when I was having little time to know why.

Considering the fact that quality comes at price, so business or no business, I will stick towards quality and will ask its price. I am not considered cheap and only those people who can not risk, come to me. My struggle to get things better isn't going to be an easy task and I will try to retain trusted links and will also keep a watch on quality.

Just because parts bear the name of a well known manufacturer, does not mean that they made the parts!!!

Chinese companies are producing crap products, made to look like top products from top companies....

Its a really serious problem for all concerned.....

Please everyone fasten your seat belts before clicking on this link!

http://www.voltimum.co.uk/news/9428/infopro.whatsnew.latest/Counterfeiting-Alert.html

milo

Look alike simple parts can be of serious problem. More problem is when they carry same number and make mark on them. MCBs are in the market for $20 to $0.5 and those sold for $0.5 are meant to kill.

Worst of all this is the power supply I get is often 280V in place of 230V and at times it becomes 500V. When I enquired why they do not monitor and correct the faulty power, the operator told me that only when things blow in some house and people come and complain about it, they look at it else they consider everything OK. People really won't know why things are blowing as most of the people have not heard of instruments like multimeter or AC voltmeter. I have not seen any house having a volt meter installed for their power points. Only power meter and MCB or switches are installed.

Some MCB like devices are actually only isolators or switches. They do not have protection device inside, however they look like MCB.

Please check up on the pinout of the L7905. The pinout for the negative regulators is NOT the same as for the positive ones!!!

I hope this solves your problem.

I'll try that again, the pinout for the positive regulator wasn't the right one:

It is not the circuit PIN out for IC problem. Circuits are designed in standard format but some IC picked from Market marked L7905 ST make are actually not L7905 regulators but some fake ICs having same markings.

That is the problem we are seeing for some years now, in a nutshell......

I have just now received 500 BNC connectors Tyco marked Tyco make from Tyco dealer. These parts carry Manufacturing mark of R.O.C. (China) and are part numbers 5-1634523-1. They also list Directive 2002/95/EC (RoHS) Compliant marking on box. They look inferior quality and insulation is not PTFE and perhaps might not have been tested for 1500V for which they were supposed to be tested and guaranteed for 500V working. I need to do all that testing now. I think insulation is polyester like material and made from a pipe and they are not CNC machined parts. Their look differs from drawing and picture on Tyco part list. There is no certificate of detailed specifications with material sent to me and as this differs from catalog on Tyco page, I wonder to what they should be related to.

I think many companies in China are ruining the world electronics. I will not say that all China companies are bad or China can not produce good material. However, those using China for bad cheap material may also be responsible. I think they will cause serious accidents and deaths if their parts are to be trusted. Price war and poor market in recession is driving many top class companies into madness to survive with low quality cheap products now from China. World will not be same again. There was time when each part was designed with lots of care. It is volume and profit time and with junk material being dumped all over the world.

CFL in India from good companies were working for 3-5 years for me and now China make 1/20th price work only for few months and these killed the market of good quality products pushing them out of business.

We have recently had a "Chines Crap" flooding world market blog, if you did not see it I can look it out for you. I think we have already discussed this "to death" there.....

A few years ago we first started working with one Chinese CM on a new electronics-based product. And as we discussed our design the rep very kindly warned us that if wanted our product to work we needed to specify our components with tighter and heavier tolerances than necessary. In other words, we wouldn't get what we asked for. Scary.

To our knowledge though we've not seen any counterfeit parts in our units built there or in our inventory of components here. But we have run into the very frustrating problem of substitution of components. That is, we call for a Brand X part and we get a Brand Y. Easy enough to catch, but annoying.

On a related note we have tales of woe revolving around arguments about product designs and mysteriously altered unit prototypes - but that's another thread.

Some time brand name part also comes from same manufacturer that you are offered different part number from same manufacturer you take with a pinch of salt. Reason for this is very simple. Big firms can twist their neck easily by rejecting big lot and crashing their business by law suits against them etc. and this makes people to behave. It is not so easy to get justice for small part purchasers who casually come and go away. You get what they give you. Like it or not, small purchasers are not very important for business.

I AM A FRANCISE DISTRIBUTOR OF SOME LINES

IN EUROPE YOU FIND MORE GENUINE PARTS.

IF YOU WANT I CAN HELP YOU

BEST REGARDS

MICHELE MOSCATI

RAMOS SRL

MMOSCATI@IOL.IT

How do you think you can help? Do you have facility to test parts? How will you establish genuineness of the parts? We are talking about functional quality of the products here.

Here problem is that, can you help yourself from not getting bad parts into your stock or sale. When manufacturers themselves not going down low in quality, how can you avoid that. At best you can transfer blame on the manufacturer. We are talking here, how to find out what we buy is genuine or not and I am sure that no stockist ever has facility to test any part or get part tested for genuineness. Such chains are actually are middle-links which break the Traceability of parts or its source

I think only manufacturers can give guaranty after testing parts as they must have such facility. People who do quality work should also be given greater value for their efforts than middleman doing sale of parts from some source as patch up work.

I purchased Analog Device AD549 parts from RS Components at high price and all parts were found to be dead and then I purchased same parts from Future Electronics Canada and many of the parts were bad. I requested many manufacturers to open small channel to let researcher and developers purchase parts from them directly and many of them agreed and now I can directly purchase from Analog Devices, Maxim, Texas Instruments, Intersil and many other companies but some companies are still working through dealers and distributors and do not have direct sale outlet and their products are not trusted well.

It is all right to have sales business for local zones where people can come back to you if they have problem, but can I come back to you from India with all parts? You will keep saying that you sell genuine parts. Only manufacturers at times take responsibility and replace parts. You have no way to do that.

I have informed the Tyco dealer that he has sent parts that are not of quality and I am sure he can not replace these as sending back is a serious problem. Company in USA and manufacturing part in China and parts coming thru Dubai and then middleman so called a local distributor is a mesh.