Andrew Hutchings, known as ‘LinuxJedi’, talks about ordering chips and receiving fakes.
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings changed, usually to make them appear as if they are a more expensive chip. This has happened to me, so I’ll talk a bit about it.
As part of my work restoring the Acorn Atom, I replaced the 6502 CPU with a much lower power CMOS variant made by Rockwell, the R65C02. But something was bugging me. In my tests, I didn’t notice any power drop between that and the original CPU.
You see, the original 6502 used an NMOS process which is typically much more power hungry than CMOS. On top of this, the R65C02 was made using a smaller fabrication size. These things combined means that in-theory it should draw an order of magnitude less power. The R65C02 has an extended instruction set, so it is usually easy to identify.
See how Andrew determined the chip wasn’t genuine and the pervasiveness of this practice in the post here.
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