what year did fake jfet's start showing up?

[spi]

Hi everyone,

Does anybody know what year the production of TO-92 2n5457s and j201s stopped?

When did fakes start showing up on the market?  I assume nobody had incentive to fake them before production stopped, right?

[Rob Strand]

I remember this thread,

Feb 2013,
https://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=101568.0

Also, Feb or Oct 2012 (depending on date format)
https://www.soselectronic.com/articles/no-name/bf245-the-legend-is-leaving-the-successor-comes-1184

There were announcements on ON Semiconductor and maybe Fairchild but they are gone now.

It just got worse since then.

While there are outright fakes, and parts that doen't even work, what I've notice is virtually any JFET other than NOS types have VGS_off of 1V or less.    There seems to be a few manufacturing sources of low VGS_off JFETs and they get falsely-marked or  are re-marked with the "old" part numbers.

[amptramp]

The fake parts problem has been going on for decades.  There has been a Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP) for decades (I believe it started in 1991) to identify fake components and warn designers of end-of-life issues.  At a company I was at in the 90's we got acquainted with the program and had an example show up in one of our purchases: a 74HC74 with 16 pins!  A 74HC74 has 14 pins.  It would have been interesting to see what was inside the device.  We paid attention to GIDEP alerts after that.

I am not sure about the timeline for fake JFET's but it could have been as early as the mid 1990's as the problems had surfaced to the extent that a government department was initiated to handle the issue.  These devices could have been culls that failed to meet specifications but still operated as JFET's or they could have been pretty much anything.

[Rob Strand]

As for the original question,  this one is early 2012 announcing end of of the J201's and 2N5457's,

https://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=97473.0

Jackpot, halfway down,

http://www.hawestv.com/amp_projects/fet_preamp/fetpreamp1.htm

"In 2011, Fairchild obsoleted the MPF102 and J201. Other JFETs that are compatible with the MPF102 (2N3819, 2N5458, etc.) are also obsolete! When current stocks run out, Fairchild will not provide more. For the time being, you can still buy these devices from vendors or factory representatives (see below.)"


Regarding fakes,

Without spending a lot of time on it, here's some GIDEP graphs,

This one covers 2001 to 2010,  see p14,
https://nepp.nasa.gov/workshops/etw2010/talks/08_Hughitt_Counterfeit%20Electronics%20-%20All%20the%20World%27s%20a%20Fake.pdf

This one covers 2005 to 2018, see p3,
https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/SIA-Comments-84-FR-32861-Counterfeiting.pdf

I'm pretty sure the context of the incidents detected cover formal supply chains as opposed to ebay.

Also the increase in monitoring and counter-measure may have deflected fakes from the more formal supply chains.  There is clearly a decrease in recent times.

I haven't read all the fine print, other than noticing some concerns about the accuracy of the data.

[spi]

Thanks for those articles.  Looking at the slide presentation, it just blows my mind the effort to counterfeit parts that were only worth cents to begin with (and that it's still presumably profitable to do it).

[amptramp]

When you build parts to military specifications, the prices are dollars apiece, not pennies.  And they use a lot of them.

We also had some companies that bought up old germanium and silicon foundries to continue manufacturing devices that were obsolete and had been abandoned by the original companies.  The effort to change a design, perform qualification testing and field replacements exceeded the cost on many programs of just buying from a new company running an obsolete foundry.  The salesman for one of these companies was a guy by the name of Rusty Key - it looks like the industry found a guy with the right name.