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Originally Posted by Argus25
I have been quite astonished of late at the re-manufacturing or refurbishing of semiconductors and IC's that has been going from Shenzhen, that doco helps explain some of it.
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Yes, it's remarkable. What I find most interesting is this local ecosystem for getting things done. Many of the projects I work on get built in tens or hundreds, which is in the annoying gap between prototyping and mass production. If I could walk round the corner and chat with a selection of eager PCB suppliers, component vendors and assemblers, that would be marvellous.
The recycled components are an interesting one. It's stick my neck out and say that for many uncritical applications nobody really cares about the history of the parts as long as most of them work. I've been stung (fortunately not at my own expense) with supposedly legitimate parts from official distributors which turned out to be anything but. My favourite was some StrongArm SA1100 processors which actually had no silicon inside. I wondered why the boards wouldn't boot up, and after exhausting all the expected possibilities we X-rayed the chips and found nothing in there but a tangle of bond wires. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry!
Chris