Fake Chinese Parts 'Found In US Planes'

Yahoo News ^ | 22nd May 2012 | Yahoo News

[the scotsman]

'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.

A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.

"This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores China's failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify," he added.

As part of a year-long investigation, the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet. Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers. The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the "epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting".

The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed. US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.

The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking "knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems".

Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it".'

[Hodar]

What about the scantily clad super-models with low moral standards? Are you telling me that those too, are a farce? < /sarcasm>

There is a conspiracy behind every brush, bottle cap and piece of belly button lint.

[sam_paine]

Justa’s nothing. Wait until “null and void” tells you about the one-terminal inductor and 64-bit ARM core he’s invented!

[Erasmus]

Wooh! We may already be seeing the results of some of them!

≤}B^)

[null and void]

59. Built the world's first microprocessor with on chip ROM and RAM, built the world's brightest GaAsP LED, made a silicon IR photodetector sensitive enough to force NBS to recalibrate their standards, hold 5 US patents, with several pending.

And your bona fides are?

[Hodar]

I know that strip!! I bought it at Fry’s in Austin, TX. It was great!! The outlets were like 25% further apart than standard.

I opened mine up because outlet #3 didn’t work. It looked like someone had taken the wire and impaled it on a prong, then hit the wire with a soldering gun and some solder. Talk about cold solder joint Valhalla.

I took out my 75 Watt Weller gun, and about 10 minutes later and about a foot of the heavy-duty rosin core solder, and it was ready to go.

Still use it - it’s a little longer than the standard, but it accomodates the “wall wart” transformers without losing 2 sets of outlets.

[skeeter]

What responsibility (in your world) does the system manufacturer have to test and validate the systems they build with imported or domestic components?

Do companies do 100% component testing in your world, or have they, like everyone else in the western world, adapted lean manufacturing processes?

You have to be able to trust your sources not to commit fraud. Whether the Chinese are doing it intentionally is another question.

[gandalftb]

Good posts.

The Chinese have duplicated nearly every electronic part there is and they sell functional parts that work......for a while. What they don’t sell, unless they are specifically required to, are milspec parts that are load tested and sturdy enough for military use.

Their other problem is quality control. Unless they are required to, they pull far fewer parts out for random testing, so Chinese electronics have a much higher failure rate.

Case in part are capacitors for frequency drives. Nearly all came from Japan, very high quality and sturdy. Then the tsunami hit and destroyed 80% of the capacitor factories.

Taiwan assembles most of the boards and had to go to Chinese capacitors that had supposedly the same QC as the Japanese. Soon, many frequency drives started to fail because of too many bad capacitors.

So, the frequency drive makers then required every Chinese capacitor to be load tested, dramatically slowing down frequency drive deliveries.

The Chinese are perfectly capable of producing high quality parts. They respond to market demand. If cheap is what you want, cheap is what you get.

There are too many electronics makers hungry for cheap parts and then passing them off as something of quality.

[Erasmus]

[...] and 64-bit ARM core he’s invented!

I heard about that project and I already have two samples.

(Sometimes, I'm just two humerus.)

[Erasmus]

[...] and 64-bit ARM core he’s invented!

I heard about that project and I already have two samples.

(Sometimes, I'm just two humerus.)

[Hodar]

Thank you for that listing on Chinese parts.

I’ve never bought Chinese components - but I can certainly see why people do!! At those prices, even if you had 5% fallout in production, the cost savings would still make the line profitable. I’m used to dealing with a manufacturing line at the 98-99.5% yield rate - and at those levels, barely making any margins.

With the BOM at about 10% of the cost for American - I can see why they are whipping out butts.

[Bobalu]

There's an Asian board house that will make up 10 custom 2 layer boards and ship them to you for just 13.90 (1.39 each including shipping) We submitted gerbers that matched another product's board but added a set of pads and traces for a small sm uC placed beneath the processor in the original design. Once you soldered down the sm uC and placed the bigger 28 pin uC over it it was invisible. It was wired to the other uC's 5v and gnd and connected to some of its IO pins.

Everything looked completely normal but when put into service the board would sometimes come alive with a mind of its own...lol The fun we had with those boards. :-)

There was 7kb of flash storage available in the tiny uC after the firmware was flashed. It would store data in that flash and spew it out again at interesting times and modified for maximum hilarity.

BTW the cheap board house is http://iteadstudio.com

[unkus]

You guys are hilarious. But I’d feel better if you ninnies were on their side leading them around with hare-brained concepts.

---

You are mixing me up with someone else.

[Hodar]

The Chinese are remarkable businessmen, I mean as a culture it seems like everyone has this dream of owning their own business. Whether it’s a bench and selling food, or opening some factory and duplicating someone else’s products.

If there is a product to be made, they will do it, they will do it as well as they can, and they will sell it cheap. I’ve seen auto-winding Rolex watches that were so good that US Pawn stores lost money buying the fakes. I’ve seen some really nice looking Tag Heur, Buliva and yes, even Timex fakes. I’ve seen fake Colgate toothpaste - but my all time favorite was the fake anti-skid brakes for one of our fighters.

This was a $2000 anti-skid brake pad for a fighter bomber. The brake pad was shaped almost perfectly, powder coated paint job, proper thickness and upon first inpection it looked ‘almost’ identical to the real thing. But, instead of brake material it was made with asphalt, dirt and Yak dung. If it weren’t by accident that a box got wet and started to smell - they could have been placed into service.

Then, when the Brass found out - the close scruitiny came out. They had cut this out of a car bumper, hammered it flat on one side (no hammer imprints on the powder-coated side. The brake material looked more ‘black’ than the ‘dark tan’ of the real thing. Also, the real brake pads don’t smell like Yak poo.

[Aqua225]

No, you couldn’t, if the test was proper. A proper test would be able to detect stray capacitance, strange forward voltages, power dissipation, etc. generated by the microprocessor as it spun up, worked, and spun down.

The only way a component like that would make it into a reliable system would be for the OEM (read American defense contractor) to give the test sufficient wiggle room, that they could substitute their own substandard parts in the design, and make a killing on government contracts.

Thems the facts, probably won’t like’em.

I see the Chinese as very astute capitalists with regards to this. They know what the American manufacturers did, and they are exploiting the same loop holes.

Improve the tests or just get rid of the computers. That isn’t going to happen. There is no modern jet fighter plane in the sky that can fly without them -— the airframes are far too unstable for a human to manage all the variables.

[toldyou]

Our commercial airlines have been outsourcing for years...I don’t like it!

“Domestic repair stations bidding against the likes of Ameco in Beijing face steep competition. In the past few years, Ameco, a facility that employs low-wage Chinese, has enticed United Airlines to move its 747 and 777 overhaul maintenance work to Beijing.”

“We asked both United and Ameco for a visit to the Beijing facilities, and initially both accepted. Then about a week before the team’s visit, after weeks of preparation with Ameco and successfully obtaining permission from the Chinese government, Ameco suddenly backed out, saying it had “unforeseen events.”
http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/flying-cheaper/story/outsourcing-airline-maintenance/

Southwest outsources to El Salvador:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2011/04/southwest-airlines-outsourcing-maintenance-and-inspections-el-salvador

“Even those overseas facilities that the agency visits don’t have to conduct the criminal-background checks and random drug and alcohol tests on aircraft mechanics that are required at domestic facilities. And it’s difficult for the FAA to stage surprise inspections, as it does in the U.S. Overseas outsourcing has gotten “truly out of control.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24068455/ns/business-us_business/t/us-airlines-outsource-majority-repairs/

[Bobalu]

At those prices, even if you had 5% fallout in production, the cost savings would still make the line profitable.

http://www.taydaelectronics.com

There are even cheaper suppliers but you have to buy from them in enormously large quantities. This outfit is not the cheapest but they take paypal and shipping is very cheap for standard post...takes a couple of weeks to arrive though. You can find cheaper suppliers on ebay from China with free shipping...I just got a envelope from China with 100X 5-Pin Female Mini B USB SMD Socket Connectors for just 16.99 including the ship cost...that's 17 cents each! It's amazing.

Here they are

[Hodar]

This has been known for a long time. What’s news is we aren’t doing anything about it.

What can we do? Seriously?

Semi-conductor equipment that used to costs tens/hundreds of millions soon becomes obsolete. It's still functional, just obsolete - so it get sold. Someone in China buys it - say from someone in Singapore. They then find an old processor, and de-process it (it's easier than you would think) and from the de-processing steps, re-create a "mask" to they can effectively counterfeit this chip.

Because they probably use no error-correcting analysis on their stolen design - they have a product with mediocure yield, and poor reliability. But, selling a 3 inch wafer that has virtually zero R&D costs, is made with obsolete components, and once that die is cut - is virtually untraceable ... what can you do?

The packaging house that sticks the die in a package doesn't necessarily know what part they are sticking in a ceramic package. They really don't care. Did the die get delivered as promised? Did the check clear? Ok, .. here are your chips.

Now, you label them with a counterfeit stamp, part number, lot number and sell them to a re-seller. Money in your pocket; and the re-seller is getting them so cheap, he doesn't care if 10% of them come back. Think of buying parts for $0.10 and selling them for $2.50 into a market where these part typically go for $5. They get gobbled up quickly.

Ever wonder why Apple iPods last seemingly forever, yet those cheap knock-offs you buy at Walmart fail after a year or two? Now you know why.

[Eva]

That is one of the funniest videos that I have seen, mostly because of the bit of truth that inspired it.

I sent it to my husband. I bet it goes viral within the industry.

[null and void]

Not saying it would be perfect, not saying it would be trivial, but a part could be made that would pass ordinary testing with flying colors and still be able to “fail” on command.

Sneaking it in gets easier if I sell it to you on the board, the higher order errors hide better in the board parasitics, non linear effects from the nearby components, etc.

If I’m a nation state or a big company with deep pockets and abundant resources I can reverse engineer a targeted chip and add a firmware trap.

[montag813]

THANK YOU BILL CLINTON!