Counterfeit Cyclone II in China market?

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, 

 We have received a batch of boards from China (Shenzhen) that contains a Cyclone II (EP2C5Q208C7N) FPGA. Many of the boards fail with data corruption on external buses driven by the FPGA. When debugging one of the boards the FPGA was found to have a damaged I/O pin - it lacked drive capability and the output voltage was not sufficient. When changing the FPGA to one obtained from Digikey in USA the functionality is ok.  Does Altera have any issues with remarked or otherwise bad FPGAs being sold in the China market? At this time we don't trust the Chinese board house, especially since they behind our back have swapped out other parts like LEDs, capacitors and resistors without letting us know - we only found out due to the different look of the parts.  We will in the future insist on only having our board house buy from approved distributors but for now we have to figure out what causes the current problems.  The FPGA from Digikey has the text on the top of the package in bright white colorwhile the Chinese-sourced onces have a more etched look.  Can the bad FPGAs be sent to Altera for authenticity check? Could these problems be caused by an incorrect reflow temperature during SMT?  Thanks, /John.

[Altera_Forum]

Hi John,  

 I'm not an Altera Employee, so I don't know if there are currently known Altera Clones in the market, but I do know there are large grey markets, that often deal in sub-standard, and re-marked parts.   Almost all the manufacturers are very interested in these types of issues. You can contact your rep, and have them verify the legitimacy of the lot, and if it's a legitimate Altera part, they can do a failure analysis on the part and hopefully tell you if it was simply too hot of a flow temp that caused the damage, ESD or other issue.  As far as the difference in markings, Altera probably uses multiple packaging houses, so differences in markings is not un-heard of, but this they will verify this as well. Check the country of origin marking between the two and see if they are the same, If they are not, it's a clue.  Pete

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks Pete. I will drop Altera an email. Perhaps they are interested in investigating further.

[Altera_Forum]

Interesting issue, but IMO in this case, the usage of relabeled devices (the most common prob with asia based development) should not be the problem. A bad pin is a bad pin. But could it be possible that devices, which failed the end test in the fab were not destroyed but came to the market again?

[Altera_Forum]

Could be. All i can do is to test all the boards myself and replace any bad parts... Luckily, this is only a prototype series of 100 boards...

[Altera_Forum]

I told my FAE. 

 The factory has already been advised.