I sent a sample to National Semiconductor three weeks ago, but no response as yet. I sent another follow-up e-mail today. It's ironic how interested they were in the beginning, but not so much now.

 

Well, they probably receive hundreds a week. And If you are not a multi-thousand bulk buying company, you may not even get a form letter.

Im still interested to see if they respond.

 

Well, they probably receive hundreds a week. And If you are not a multi-thousand bulk buying company, you may not even get a form letter.

Im still interested to see if they respond.

My somewhat cynical nature causes me to suspect that if the device was mismarked by NS, they will never admit it. My attitude springs from many years of working for big companies.

 

I can completely understand them accidentally misprinting the chip code, but not the date code.

It would be completely understandable for a quality assurance person to see a part that looks like a billion other parts they produce with a well used chip code, but to see a date code that doesn't exist, that seems far fetched.

And if they noticed the date code discrepancy, they would have added it to their database, to cover the error, still thinking the part code was correct.

maybe.

 

I guess the following is as "official" an answer as I am going to get from National Semiconductor.

Hi xxxxxxx,

I was out on vacation for 2 weeks.
I checked the marking under the scope it's 01AD and again I am not able to find this in our lot tracking system.
I suspect this is not a genuine NSC part.

Regards,
Lorena

 

Unfortunately bad parts get everywhere. We purchased 200 PCI-X cards from a large OEM, and it turned out after a week or two of running them, that some of the capacitors were letting go and catching fire (visible flash of flame on a couple of them, just lucky enough to be out on the desk and being looked at at the time).
It turns out that a whole shipment of capacitors to this manufacturer was somehow redirected and replaced with fakes.
Hopefully tracecom you have all of the parts that you require now for your project.
I think it is good that your supplier (Jameco) appear to have responded to this once it was pointed out that it was more than a mistake, and (hopefully) will be testing the products comming through more stringently for the minute. I do not know the company, but suspect that they probably have a diverse range of products, and getting equipment and procedures to test every type of chip that comes through would be difficult.
It would appear, also, I suspect, that only some of the parts in this batch are working incorrectly? That would make it even more difficult to test for (how many in a batch do you test!)