Professional Forensic Analysis of a sketchy Pro-Mini (ATMEGA328P) - is it Counterfeit?

so not too long ago i made a video about a cheap pro mini that was sent to me by somebody that was trying to replicate the same sleep current i had shown in a video i made a long time ago on low power design for the atmega328 and in that video i actually pulled the chip off of that pro mini board i put it on another board tested everything apples to apples i even put a special order into digikey to get a 2020 date code 18 mega tested everything out and it turned out that just something was wrong with that chip so i had just immediately thought that it was counterfeit and in the comments for that video there's a lot of people suggesting that maybe it was a gray market chip that had failed the wafer sword or something like that so then i thought you know maybe it would be cool to send this part to a company i had worked with in the past called sensible micro and i thought it would be cool to send it to them based on another experience i had recently where i was involved in a massive redesign of a product where the whole point of the redesign was because one component had gone obsolete on the board and there was a last time by just there the part was just no longer available they had scoured the world they couldn't find it and i just you know reached out to uh sensible micro and they saved the day the next day they located a massive inventory of the part i had talked to the customer about it and they were like that's impossible must be uh black market counterfeit chips well sensible micro one of their specialties is also analyzing the chips and guaranteeing that they're authentic so they put them through a full gauntlet of testing and you know they prove that it's genuine authentic parts um so why not send them this same chip here and see what they have to say about it so that's what i did and they got back to me and i think the results were very very interesting take a look hey good morning everybody my name is chris torione i am president and co-founder of sensible micro corporation and i'm excited to work on this project with kevin and bring some information to you guys we are based out of tampa florida name of the company sensible micro and we're a distributor and global sourcing partner for electronic components so we deal with a lot of oems a lot of contract manufacturers companies who have supply chain issues obsolescence issues lead time issues things like that and uh it's interesting to read some of the comments on kevin's channel here but you know things that the engineering community is obviously having issues too as well which is finding good parts from time to time so kevin told me about this atmel device that they were getting failures on and he was looking into uh we've worked together in the past and some things and knew we had a great capability to interrogate the chip further we were excited to do that so what you're looking at here is our standard report that we do for customers when we need to confirm if that part is authentic or not um you know it all starts with external visual inspection we're looking at uh any characteristics that the chip may have that would cause red flag um the chip on the left here is the known good the chip on the right is the uh the suspect and you can see really the one on the right and it's been pulled from the board but if these were ordered new they certainly wouldn't have solder on the leads um noticing a little bit with the pin one orientation the mold cavity is just not that clear the one on the right the part marking is not as clear as the one on the left now that could be the lighting from our scope but from what i can see on it it still just doesn't look as consistent the laser etching so you know small anomalies to look at and you know make you scratch your head but nothing right off the bat that would go up these are they're definitely fraudulent chips so we start with external visual looking at the dimensionals making sure that they are indeed matching what the ocm spec uh data sheet spec documentation sees looking at the bottom of the chip you can see the mold cavities there the one on the left again very clean and um you know sharp indentations into the actual body of the component the one on the right i know it's a pull but even the the mold cavities just look they just don't look formed very well um so you know again something that is uh just not consistent the photo all the way to the right you can see that there's like an abrasion on the top of the device and that's from our inspectors doing um just a quick exacto knife across the top of the surface seeing if there's any flaking or black top coating that comes off that would show that the part's been remarked um there's a destructive analysis test that we do in-house as well that is um called the heated solvents test and that'll break down the top layer of epoxy we'll put that back under the microscope and look at it as well to see if there's any remarkings or tamperings going on the guys didn't do that here they went straight to that's the dimensionals straight to x-ray analysis so you can see right off the bat oops there's a uh major difference here and that die size um the the die frame is not consistent the one on the left is the known good again and you can see it's just a square die um the right is turned slightly and the diaphragm surround surrounding it is different as well you can see there's some indentations in that dye frame that are just not consistent um and then the dye itself is just smaller it's turned it's smaller that's an issue now i know these aren't from the same homogeneous lot um there certainly could be die revisions and things like that that occurred so you could have different sizes but um you know right off the bat our inspectors would flag these and go hey something's going on these these dies uh size locations are off if we were taking a lot of parts like we've only had two samples in this case to examine but if we had like 500 or a thousand units our machine would actually take that known good die and map it against the rest of the lot and uh to make sure there's no inconsistencies found there our next stage is going straight to our d-cap machine it's a chemical decapsulation it's called a nice scene jet etch system which we've had since 2012 and you can see the the the known good and the suspect in the one shot photo there on the left so this chemically removes the top of the chip it exposes that internal dye wafer um and again you can just see those guys are not consistent the suspect is turned um obviously different configurations that we're looking at when we go back under a microscope but the biggest telltale sign is the lithography of that wafer die and we blow these images up you can see the known good here we're looking for that atmel logo or some sort of mask or series number on the chip that points back to that exterior part working and we've got it right there atmel logo known good sample we do it for the suspect sample and what do we find manufacturer i've never heard of aries and it looks like another name listed above it the logo looks like um i guess that's supposed to be the constellation aries so um definitely not atmel definitely not at mel die i don't know of any mergers or acquisitions between atmel and aries where they would have packaged using aries die um we're not the manufacturer so we can't call something counterfeit because we don't have the ip to do that only they can do that but we can definitely call them suspect counterfeit um you know there's there's no reason why this die should be in that part an exterior marked with that mega part number so very interesting project you know um it can be scary out there when you're doing your sourcing so make sure you're aligning yourself with somebody that's reputable and knows what they're doing i know in the engineering community do it yourself projects it's probably not always feasible to do that and you know some of these older chips that you're trying to do you know some fun projects at home with ebay and other online stores it's just your only avenue so anyways best of luck to everybody and thanks kevin for having us on take care

Channel: Kevin Darrah

Views: 15,431

Keywords: counterfeit, arduino, clone, pro mini, atmega328, low power, testing, analysis, troubleshooting

Id: o0rEzcKYzGw

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020