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US Military Trying To Weed Out Counterfeit Parts
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an AP report:
"'Sprinkling' sounds like a fairly harmless practice, but in the hands of sophisticated counterfeiters it could deceive a major weapons manufacturer and possibly endanger the lives of U.S. troops. It's a process of mixing authentic electronic parts with fake ones in hopes that the counterfeits will not be detected when companies test the components for multimillion-dollar missile systems, helicopters and aircraft. It was just one of the brazen steps described Tuesday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing examining the national security and economic implications of suspect counterfeit electronics — mostly from China — inundating the Pentagon's supply chain. ... The committee's ongoing investigation found about 1,800 cases of suspect counterfeit electronics being sold to the Pentagon. The total number of parts in these cases topped 1 million. By the semiconductor industry's estimates, counterfeiting costs $7.5 billion a year in lost revenue and about 11,000 U.S. jobs."
Similar problems occur in large shipments of commodity aviation components, like shims, nutplates, etc.
A less than scrupulous outsource supplier could sprinkle 20% of the product yeild with improper components, and if the batch is large enough, never get noticed. This doesn't negate the issues that "bogus parts" cause downstream in the product's lifecycle. Bad shims (made from incorrect, but "similar" materials) can promote dielectrics to form in important assemblages, manifesting all sorts of failures.. all kinds of thing can go wrong because somebody some place didn't want to follow what was in the order to the letter and cut corners somewhere.
In electronics, I could see this being manifest in diodes that are of the wrong class being used where, eg, zener diodes are required for proper operation, or the use of poorly formulated capacitor electrolytes in mission critical noise filters, and failsafes.
The effects would be equally diasterous, and vexing to maintenance and service people. The properly sourced equipment simply shouldn't fail in those ways. The component choices were made for that specific reason.
It does not surprise me that chinese manufacturers are the big sources of this problem. The quality of manufacture and qa process from cheap factories are tied directly to the cost per unit: you get what you pay for.
...an uninformed, knee-jerk comment.
Trusted foundry is not cheap. It is not feasible to manufacture all electronics used by the federal government in the United States. This has been a well known problem for a long time. Here is an excerpt from a 2005 report.
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA435563.pdf
"Most leading edge wafer production facilities (foundries), with the exception so far of IBM and possibly Texas Instruments, are controlled and located outside the United States. The driving forces behind the “alienation” of foundry business from the United States to other countries include the lower cost of capital available in developing countries, through foreign nations’ tax, market access requirements, subsidized infrastructure and financing incentives (including ownership), and the worldwide portability of technical skills, equipment and process know-how."