I never thought about inspecting the pins before, a very good point.
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.
Re:Fake chips, I got stung
by userbinator on Friday December 08, 2023 @01:07AM
(#38565921)
Laser etching doesn't come off with acetone (and is usually much harder to read, being more like embossing than printing). That's silkscreened ink.
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).
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!