One time an ADC chip in my Rigol scope died. From the pinout, it was clearly a Chinese clone of a TI part. I wanted a replacement clone part, but it wasn't available under the clone name, so I bought the cheapest most suspicious listing of the TI part that I could find, hoping I would get the clone. Unfortunately I got the genuine article. So it goes. https://goo.gl/photos/dxU3ChWUcvCMDW4N9
Fortunately I was able to make do with the genuine part, though not trivially: there was a weird clock termination difference. It's never easy, is it?
I can only imagine your review: "Selected totally dodgy looking seller to source fake part disappointed to receive genuine item, one star for being unnecessarily honest"
Reminds me of the bit in Jekyll and Hyde where it turns out the doctor's alchemical formula only worked in the first place not because of the salt he using, but because of a unknown trace contaminant in the salt.
Also, of course: "instead of bobcat, package contained chair".
> it turns out the doctor's alchemical formula only worked in the first place not because of the salt he using, but because of a unknown trace contaminant in the salt
"In March 2007, engineers devised a manufacturing process for Fogbank. Unfortunately, the material turned out to have problems when tested, and in September 2007 the Fogbank project was upgraded to "Code Blue" status by the NNSA, making it a major priority [...]
The experience of reverse engineering Fogbank produced some improvements in scientific knowledge of the process. The new production scientists noticed that certain problems in production resembled those noted by the original team. These problems were traced to a particular impurity in the final product that was required to meet quality standards. A root cause investigation showed that input materials were subject to cleaning processes that had not existed during the original production run. This cleaning removed a substance that generated the required impurity. With the implicit role of this substance finally understood, the production scientists can control output quality better than during the original run."
Reply by Seller: "We only source original parts from original computers on original garbage heaps. We make these undesirable traits up with a very doddgy remaining lifetime of component. The Lord giveth, the lord taketh.."
I love the "I didn't want to buy another expensive $930 scope, so I fixed it using plain old elbow grease and $7000 worth of expert hardware designer time".
I have also spent thousands of dollars of my time so I wouldn't have to replace a $3 part.
Some years ago at an IETF one of the talks was about an outfit whose hosting or cloud or something pricing change was designed to prod people towards IPv6. Something like, on contract renewal you could keep the same config, same price, for the next period, but you only get IPv6, or, you could decide you must have IPv4 still, but that's a separate product now, so you need to get your finance people to sign off on the revised billing with the small extra cost for the v4 addresses you'll need as they're no longer baked in. One reason to do this was because v4 addressing does actually cost money, but they also expected it would itself drive migrations to IPv6 and they were correct.
Because "We should fix our thing to work with IPv6" sounds potentially like a fun learning experience whereas "We should talk to our finance department" sounds miserable so they're obviously gonna put a few hours into making IPv6 work rather than take the "easy" option.
IIRC They did have customers who paid for IPv4 after the changes, but the vast majority went IPv6 only.
It really puts into perspective the billions of dollars in hardware and software research that I routinely mobilize to ask ChatGPT banal questions: Are farts funny?
When editing an album in Google Photos, there's controls at the top right (on desktop browser at least) that let you insert text or maps inbetween photos
That's some drop-dead awesome troubleshooting work there. Kudos. You are now ready to tackle the boss level: reverse-engineer the Maxim trigger chips on the TDS 694C. :)
That was a great ‘blog post’! It’s awesome to see such a complicated repair coming down to a single 10ohm resistor. Amazing diagnosis!
I have a digital mixer for music recording that is also an audio interface for my computer. I had a somewhat known problem where 12 out of the 16 channels stop working.
Turns out what’s going on is the mixer is ‘gating’ the audio signal because the digital gate effect (that is built in) is claiming that it is receiving an input such that it will attenuate the audio signal.
I don’t even know how to diagnose a problem like this. It’s awesome watching someone who does!
This sort of stuff scares me with modern Chinese test gear. I'd rather have some rancid old HP or Tek stuff from the 90s and keep a couple of parts mules in the cupboard.
The lab I worked in during undergrad had a massive pile of old scopes and such. One of them was this monstrosity of a scope from the 80s (?) that had a built in thermal printer to capture the output, and was I think in the 1-2ghz range! I’m sure it’s still there, working, waiting for the next undergrad to need its assistance.
A sure telltale is laser writing. You can tell on their second example - the writing is sharp and perfect. Often the logo is not quite solid color, and you can see it has lines from the laser in it. The color of laser-'printed' text is also typical.
The originals often have pretty bad markings on them, actually. Off-center, not aligned, not evenly printed. Too perfect is suspicious.
Also look at the pins. Sometimes they dip the feet into solder to make them look unscratched and shiny. I have avoided buying 'New Old Stock' ICs because I could tell the pins had solder on them.
A couple of times I found the IC was of the type advertised (after I removed the paint). I guess they just added a fresh coat of paint to make them look new!
When it mentioned that there was something off about the printing/logo, I zoomed in and recognized it immediately. As I recall the Rockwell International logo has curves joining the angled borders, like you'd expect to see for laminar flow. The pictured one has straight lines that meet at a corner. You can see the difference in logo between the 11450 and '11473' chips.
I'm talking about the 'Another Chip' IC, which has laser writing. It's the bottom one in the header image. They use a coat of paint to obscure previous markings, then use the laser on that, resulting in brownish text (not embossed).
I once interviewed a candidate who had previously worked for the DoD as an engineer that validated components. I was blown away by how far they went to ensure the components they received were genuine and 100% matched the specs in their contract.
Yeah I did 6 months on a goods in line. We measured every single part and did full sampled testing. This was on defence grade parts as well from big vendors. They were rebagged, kept in stores ready for use so there were no surprises.
Why is the defence industry so much more intense when it comes to checking parts? Is it mostly because it may be years or decades between purchase and usage?
Money, time, and perceived/realised risk of failure (to both the end user, and the supplier). Any time you have enough of those, the scrutiny will increase.
If you're making a chicken feeder IoT device, the amount of marginal QA cost you can tolerate is low (in fact, you're probably tempted to use the counterfeits...) and the only adverse outcome is a slightly hungry chicken. Medical devices have a much higher risk, but not as much money or time as military (a bottomless pit of both), so the QA level is higher there, but probably not as much as defence.
Some good answers here, but at the end of the day it's this:
If the components don't work in a military situation, people might very well die. Sometimes a lot of people.
A counterfeit microprocessor in a dollar store Furby clone probably isn't going to kill anyone if it fails. The same microprocessor in a surface-to-air missile? Well...
Whether or not the thing keeps soldiers alive is actually pretty far down the list of reasons to control the supply chain (see, for instance, the various reviews of the M249, or the specific small-p political decisions around the M16 design. I've heard first hand accounts of Afghan National Army/Police answering calls while the US Army operated cell phone jammers a few feet away). The main thing is consistency.
If you can depend on depend on your machine gun to jam if you fire it for more than 3 seconds, then you just don't fire it for that long. But if you have no way of knowing how many rounds you'll get out of it (if any) before it jams, you'll just stop using the thing.
Further, a lot of the procurement rules devolve down to "is this supply chain a strategic weak point?" We don't buy our HMMWV tires from Russia not out of quality concerns, but to deny them that weapon. So the testing is done to verify provenance, rather than quality.
> If the components don't work in a military situation, people might very well die. Sometimes a lot of people.
Sure, but if the components do work, people might very well die. Sometimes a lot of people. Probably different people.
Military (and aviation) want uniform, reliable parts and to be able to do post mortem investigation of failures where they lessons learned can be applied to the installed base and future production.
You can't do that very well when you don't even know who made your ICs to ask them what happened during production or to improve their processes.
In the best case, the threat of using them is enough to get the job done. But for the threat to be genuine, they have to work reliably. This is definitely the case for nuclear and other "strategic" weapons.
Because you could defeat your enemy if you sabotaged their components! Say you were selling op-amps or oscillators you knew were going to be used in warfare. You could burn in an "easter egg" where they shut down if they received a particular RF pulse (or drifted wildly if they didn't receive some covert 'keep working' message). It would be a disaster.
Partly that. Also they tend to push parts farther - temperature range, probably also radiation hardness, maybe some other things. When you need a part with a milspec temperature range, you really want to get a part with that range, not a part with a smaller range with a forged label.
A lot of the environment stuff is more about actually testing that the part can take that.
A civilian part might be very close (or the exact same part with a different model number) and even better in some cases but as it was never tested you don’t know.
Exactly this. In my day job, I program industrial equipment that operates in very unfriendly environments (lots of heat, vibration, humidity, etc.) We pay extra for parts that are certified to be able to take the abuse.
Many of the parts aren't really any different than what you'd find inside consumer goods. They cost more because they've been tested and certified.
>Why is the defence industry so much more intense when it comes to checking parts?
mil-spec parts need to meet specific standards, and since there are equivalent parts that don't have to meet these standards, the possibility and incentive for mislabelling parts is quite high.
Welcome to the world of supply chain poisoning. Go deep enough and you uncover local stores near defense companies and military bases which are targeted to contain modified inventory in the off chance someone buys it from said location. You might have some unused phone home chips in your coffee machine and not even know it.
I've heard some similarly wild shit on the other side - the market for illicit product designs.
There are these boutique one-man contracting shops, which are closed most of the time in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen. They are contracted to do R&D for manufacturers, and deliver on firmware, product design, software, etc. but again are one-man shops which are closed much of the time.
I am told this is how the pipeline of information works between state sponsored cyber attacks on big tech companies, and their Chinese competitors.
Talking about Defense contractors, I've heard stories from govvies I know about asian dudes following them around the DC area, constantly catching them looking over their shoulders at coffee shops.
> There are these boutique one-man contracting shops, which are closed most of the time in places like Shanghai and Shenzhen.
That's not just a China thing, nor is it suspicious all by itself. I made a good living in the US doing exactly the same thing for years.
The specific shops you're talking about may have been nefarious (I don't know), but the mere existence of private contractors is not inherently suspicious. They're pretty common.
These one man shops deliver to Chinese firms (Like Huawei) hardware designs, firmware source and also other misc. software. All in one go, on contract under the auspice of "outsourcing R&D". Wayyyy too much for one person to deliver on, especially for a small office which is mostly closed.
I am not sure if I am mixing up anecdotes, but my source has mentioned that the materials provided often contain the same firmware bugs as a similar competitor's product does.
What educational background and/or practical experience route would someone have to get into the field? Is this a “requires electrical||mechanical engineering degree” role or can it be learned via apprenticeship?
Maybe you can't say, but is it safe to assume it's fairly easy to "fingerprint" apart? Or, do the counterfeits "get it right" enough where deep functional testing is required?
This was annoying because the seller is based in the UK and claims you should buy from them because you take your chances buying from China.
There are tons of eBay sellers who bulk buy from China and then resell with a huge markup but with the convenience of quicker delivery - and the slightly fake sense of being more reliable as they are UK based.
I had some mosfet gate drivers (IR2112) that were really marked as IR2113, a higher tier part. The only real way to tell what you've got is to remove most of the epoxy, then boil the rest in nitric/sulfuric acid. After much mess and fume, you'll be left with the raw die and can inspect the markings. I've done this a couple of times, it's quite cool.
In my experience, most "fakes" are crappier parts marked up to be better, or chips that have failed QA. Rarely do you get a whole clone, although for some very high volume or simple, old parts, it's a bit more common.
If you like this, check out [zeptobars](https://zeptobars.com/en/), they post high quality dieshots, and sometimes fakes.
I've heard a story of the opposite, mislabeled from the manufacturer themselves! They were pressing the buyer to upgrade to a newer, faster MOSFET, but the buyer wasn't interested in dealing with going through the EMC compliance process again, so wanted the older parts. Eventually the seller appeared to relent, and shipped a box of FETs with the older label, but lo and behold the assembled boards failed EMC testing, and it turned out the manufacturer had just labelled their newer parts with the old part number and hoped no-one would notice.
> although for some very high volume or simple, old parts, it's a bit more common
And often the prevalence of the high volume parts actually makes it nearly impossible to find things using the originals.
For example, I once wanted a real FT232 breakout board (or at least a clone that can do most of what the original can do) to use some of the bit-banging features of the chip. But the most popular clones of that chip are very much reduced functionality variants that work as a USB-to-UART but don't do most of the other functionality. This was probably not helped by the fact that the original chips, and early more faithful replicas had onboard flash and allowed a degree of programming, but then the manufacturer of the original chip embedded malware in their Windows driver that detected and wrote bad data to the clones flash (which would have broken many products sold to consumers with them - technically fixable by removing the driver and re-flashing, but probably in most cases just becoming e-waste). So the clone manufacturers responded by simplifying: removing the flash, and removing most of the programmable functionality, and focusing on the UART part that was the most common use case.
Now, no matter how hard you try pre-purchase to make sure something is a full FT232 implementation (including asking for assurance about the chip up front) on a marketplace like Aliexpress or eBay, you are far more likely than not to got a limited functionality clone.
Do you know if both those parts have different die? Many product ranges are determined by binning - so all the die look the same, but the ones that test with worse performance are designated a lower tier part number.
> This was annoying because the seller is based in the UK and claims you should buy from them because you take your chances buying from China.
There are a couple of vendors who do this in the UK. They sell counterfeit crap while complaining about it loudly. I bet this was littlediode. Got into a large argument with them over sending out crappy clone / reject bin transistors a few years back.
Edit: at the same time I would like to buy a hell of a lot of 2N5458's and relabel them as MPF102's and retire. The MPF102 was an unbinned garbage JFET with wide characteristic spread. The 5458 is a binned one within the range of an MPF102. Same process. Of course though all the crap schematics out there on the Internet demand the MPF102 because that's what Radio Shack sold and no one knows how to substitute parts!
I've recently been annoyed by "UK sellers" that actually ship from China, but using Yodel's "last mile" logistics[1]. They'll give you the tracking code for the Yodel part of the journey, and it'll take a week longer than the originally advertised, but they'll swear they shipped from the UK.
It was not littlediode this time, I'm not going to name them (you'll be able to tell with a search as the chip has the same date code on their auction). There are several out there that buy from China and resell. The good ones at least run a barrage of tests first.
I regularly get fake NXP chips even from the big distributors. Not going to name them here, but it happened at least with the ones starting with A, D and M. Their excuse is always the same: Telling us they just sourced other distributors because of shortage at the manufacturer, but won't name these "distributors". Really annoying.
I buy almost exclusively from Mouser and Digikey for this exact reason. They are both very active about ensuring that what they sell is what they say it is.
I'm sure that even they get scammed from time to time, but I've never had a problem with my orders (or at least, none that I've noticed). Their prices are higher, but I consider their markup well-earned.
Why even go to the trouble of actually shipping a product at that point?
I'm really surprised by the length people will go to, in order to scam others. Someone took the time to do a fake plastic chip, or reprint a silk screen on an chip with a matching pin-out. My favorites are fake USB drives and "fake" GPUs. The amount of time that has to go into finding old GPUs, faking a driver and relabeling seems like it would exceed the value of the scam, but apparently not.
If you fail to ship anything, that's an open and close case of fraud. If you ship anything, especially if it's at least superficially similar, you can argue it was a good-faith mistake, just a case of failed due diligence.
Also, there's this interesting exchange I had with an eBay seller a couple of years ago. I purchased a bunch of NiMH batteries. Because I test every component I buy even for my hobby projects, I immediately noticed that they were 1/10th the capacity that they should have been, and were marked as.
I contacted the seller to return them and get a refund. They told me "honest mistake" and then began a negotiation. "How large of a refund would you accept?"
Since the batteries were useless to me, I said "100%". In the end, I did get a complete refund and didn't need to return the batteries.
^^ This. Simple rule I apply: if you can't trust the seller, make sure you can test the parts upon receiving them. If sent fakes, make sure to get your money back as a matter of principle.
Fun thought: since eBay often rules in favor of buyers, it would be fun if someone would 'abuse' this: buy a good # of often-faked parts from all sellers that offer them, test extensively, and open disputes for any fakes received. That should (in theory) cause a good deal of $ losses for any seller that sold fakes.
Maybe repeat regularly, and it might remove some fakes from the market?
This happened to me with Dell of all places a few years ago.
Back when everyone was making Windows 8 tablets with a quad-core Atom and a $350 price tag, I ordered one of theirs. It got good reviews in the Maximum PC comparo of the time, and it was available with a then-cavernous 64Gb of flash.
In week 1 the Wi-fi wouldn't keep connection. By week 2 it had fully bricked. I initiated the RMA process, and the chat monkey asked "If we refund you $50, would you keep the device?"
I ended up getting the Asus version which had a nifty little clip-on keyboard, and it at least lasted the warranty term before the touchscreen cracked.
I bought a used OnePlus 3 on ebay and because I already had another OP3 I noticed right away that the screen was different. Especially in a dark room it was obious that somebody had replaced the original OLED screen with a cheaper IPS one.
I did end up getting a partial refund for about the price of a replacement OLED screen.
I once ordered a large batch of 64pin DIP sockets from a Chinese site and received a piece of ladies' undergarment instead. It took a long time to get my money back from that transaction.
First of all, weight-and-size-accurate dummies (whatever they're actually called in English) have legitimate uses.
Second, being honest about commiting fraud is counter-productive. Comercial fraud, even though illegal, is still a commercial enterprise at its core and its goal is the same as of any other comercial enterprise: to bring in profit, the more the better. Fraud is not about sending a message on ethics, or showing off someone's character, or helping the marks to keep their money, it's about getting as much money as possible at little cost as possible (with the costs of dealing with legal persecution accounted).
This is what I mean, this product only exits to scam people. That has to show that you intent to commit fraud. So if the seller is honest, they should report the manufacturer, but they don't because the scam is the plan. I'm so tired of this crap.
1. If it's going through a marketplace, having a tracking number makes it harder for the customer to get a refund (we shipped it; it was delivered!)
2. If the customer doesn't use the product right away, having it look close enough means they might not notice its counterfeit until after the N day return window has expired.
Last paragraph: "As a side note, I have designed a prototype board that allows use of a brand new 65C02 IC made by Western Digital in retro machines. The Western Digital chips have a slightly different pinout to the others, so need a slight conversion. PCBs for this are coming soon."
Another comment on this post: "I regularly get fake NXP chips even from the big distributors. Not going to name them here, but it happened at least with the ones starting with A, D and M. ..."
I recently had an issue with some uCs that just wouldn't respond to the bootloader. I suspected they were fake, but I got them from digikey. I asked digikey if they could confirm origin, but they ignored me :(
They responded to JTAG correctly, but none of the other documented bootloader modes, which was a dealbreaker. I don't think they were actually fake, but certainly defective or at least incorrectly documented.
Every single time I've tried to use an ST device I get bit. I'm sure it's just me being unlucky, but I avoid their parts now when I can.
I've been collecting a bunch of counterfeit chips to hopefully do a write up on at some point. If you are ok they might sit for a while, I'd love to collect them for that project! Feel free to email me JohnDMcMaster at gmail.com
I've still got a counterfeit Athlon XP, IIRC a 2500 marked up to appear to be a 3200. I was able to get a refund for the fraudulent part from the credit card processor. Interestingly, AMD offered to send me a replacement, but NOT a 3200, which was top of the line at the time. I kept the counterfeit chip instead.
Like the author of this article, I had some performance problems with the part, but I was sure I had a fake when I looked at the printing on the package of the chip.
The modern version (W65C02S) is not 100% pin compatible. It would be very obvious very quickly if that had been done. There isn't another modern equivalent with the same pinout that I'm aware of.
Yes, there are many original 6502s around, and they are probably worth half of an R65C02, or even less.
Yep, you'll typically have to sacrifice a couple components to destructive test though depending on what you're trying to accomplish. GD4 Test Services is one such company I've worked with before.
Yes, this is a very common activity in electronics manufacturing. Big names, amongst many others are White Horse, Smith & Associates, Rand Technologies, etc.
Depending on the sensitivity and risk to a particular product, it's not uncommon to have a suite of testing done on a sample from every received shipment of a particular good, or set of goods. Testing typically goes beyond counterfeit detection to being within manufacturability and usability specs (e.g. solderability, lot code validation, date code validation, etc.)
Usually priced out of the hobbyist range, think 2-3k to do basic suite verification on a sample of 5 components. That would not include de-capping and die examination.
There are failure analysis labs that will do this, but $$$. There are also Chinese R&D/FA/cloning businesses that advertise publicly but I've prices start at thousands of dollars.
Even though hobbyists have setups for decapping or de-packaging, it's going to cost a lot to actually do this as a business, most of the techniques are dangerous and use toxic materials.
Yeah I do this as part of my consulting work. Typical applications are failure analysis, security research, or re-manufacturing obsolete electronics. Note however these tend to be larger projects and more than a quick die photo. Although I do (did?) smaller die photo commissions if someone is ok with the data being public.
Once I considered offering such a service for a select few parts.
But: shipping, and low $ per part doesn't make it worth the effort. If you're buying a $3 cpu it just isn't worth it to re-route through a testing service for several additional $ per pc. + shipping.
Now if talking about say, $100+ / piece parts, sure. But then the testing services would have to be extensive, professional, and equipped accordingly. Above my pay grade, so to speak.
But yes it would be nice if such service(s) existed.
Good points. I hadn't really thought through the economics of it. I wonder... if the testing could be automated at high speed, would that make the economics work? That would enable being able to service entities that buy larger quantities of parts, reducing the impact of shipping costs. Those don't have to even be companies -- I already buy most of the parts for my hobby projects in larger quantities, in order to get bulk discounts, free shipping, and to have sufficient stock on hand that I don't need to order things every time I start a new project.
I agree with this. I often get asked to decap + image chips commercially and its not usually worth it unless its a value add / loss leader as part of a larger project.
I'm familiar with this one, but there may be others: embedded systems. There is a huge market of industrial controllers that were designed around the 6502 and for which there is a large, solid, existing code base. New designs often use 6502-based controllers in order to maintain compatibility with that code base, and existing machines need to be able to be repaired.
Fun fact: the ARM is largely based on the 6502. You could argue that the 6502 was a RISC chip before RISC was a thing!
I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but the 6502 definitely had some RISC-ish features.
The Page 0 addressing mode basically let you use the first page of RAM more or less as 256 extra 8-bit registers (or 128 16-bit registers, etc.), as those locations could be accessed faster and with fewer instruction bytes than locations elsewhere in RAM.
A fair number of languages were implemented on 6502-based machines by using multiple Page 0 locations to simulate wider registers.
Depends on what you call RISC, I guess: many people would argue that a load-store architecture is a required part of it, and the zero-page is actually an anti-thesis to that. In fact, it hints at the possibility of a memory-memory architecture (no general-purpose registers, minimal amounts of indexing/address registers). Implementations of such architecture could, of course, use whatever amount of hardware registers (unexposed in the instruction set itself) as a memory cache. Throw in some relaxed memory model, e.g. other cores don't see the memory stores via [STACK_REGISTER+offset] unless an explicit flush command is issued, and I imagine the end result will be quite nice to both use from the programmer's point of view (no register allocation!) and from the implementers point of view as well (register allocation is back, but now it's register- and memory-renaming, the latter being simplified by the lax memory model). One of the downsides is that the instruction encoding definitely won't be compact, with all those memory offsets instead of register numbers.
I've been wanting to squeeze that ARM fact in one of my Archimedes blog posts, but somehow never got around to it. It is pretty cool how it was developed.
These chips are not made. They are relabelled. In this case an older, somewhat compatible, and likely lower value chip was relabelled as something newer and likely more valuable. I have also heard of chips being relabelled as something incompatible, so in a sense the author got lucky.
But I suspect you're right if it came to actual manufacturing of counterfeits.
I wonder if it's possible to replace a ton of these really old CPUs by a combination of an FPGA, level shifters and a flash chip that contains a re-implementation of said CPU in FPGA bitstream.
Oh, absolutely, but it is usually way more expensive than buying a load of chips in the chance you'll get a genuine one.
I work on a project called PiStorm that replaces the 68000 series of CPUs using a small FPGA for bus translation and a Raspberry Pi.
I do know the supplier I bought them from bought them in the hundreds. I also know I'm the first customer who has noticed they are counterfeit.
So, there is still enough money there I guess.
Yes, I agree. Looks exactly like 贤. The irony is that this character means “virtuous, worthy, good; able”, but you’ve received a rather un-virtuous counterfeit chip.
It's more likely to be the name of the QA person that checked it. Writing a literal "OK" is so much easier if they just wanted it mark it as good otherwise.
I thought I'd check with GPT-4 vision preview just to see what it could make of the character. Unfortunately, it couldn't figure it out.
> The logographic character you're referring to appears to be a Chinese
character, but it's not clearly written which makes it difficult to identify
with certainty.
(There was more to the response, but it was more about why the character might be written there)
Yea, I tried a couple of AIs on it whilst writing that post and didn't get anywhere. It does look like elsewhere in the comments here people have maybe figured it out though.
I'm stumped. I've never been good with handwritten Chinese, but even rotating it I can't match it to any valid character. The closest I got was 阹 which means "to surround"
New / old stock? I have a supplier called TV SAT in Poland who is pretty reliable. I've had pretty good success with UTSource. But it really depends on what you are looking for. Usually it is a case of looking at reviews and crossing your fingers.
Another comment on this post: "I regularly get fake NXP chips even from the big distributors. Not going to name them here, but it happened at least with the ones starting with A, D and M. ..."
Fortunately I was able to make do with the genuine part, though not trivially: there was a weird clock termination difference. It's never easy, is it?