Gefälschte Chips aus Elektroschrott: Industrieverband fordert strikte Nutzung autorisierter Lieferketten

ECIA issued a formal position paper in June reaffirming that authorised-channel sourcing is non-negotiable for safety-critical electronics, as researchers document counterfeiters relabelling scavenged e-waste chips as new, high-specification parts. Detection is improving, but the fraud has moved upstream to where the components are made. The Electronic Components Industry Association issued a formal position paper in June restating that manufacturer-authorised sourcing is the only acceptable channel for the component industry, ECIA said . David Loftus, ECIA’s president and chief executive, said: “ECIA exists to advance a supply chain that customers can trust absolutely.” Gray-market and independent broker channels, the association argues, carry counterfeit risk, improper storage history and parts of unverifiable origin that authorised distribution is built to exclude. The stakes are not abstract: a single failed component in aerospace, defence or medical equipment can carry life-safety consequences, which is precisely the risk authorised sourcing exists to remove. Damian Semple , Franchise Marketing Manager, comments: “Authorised channel sourcing isn’t a compliance checkbox. It’s the only way to know what you’re actually buying.” Where counterfeit components actually originate The scale of the problem is larger than most buyers assume. Counterfeit goods drove roughly $467bn in global trade in 2021 alone, with electronics accounting for around 10% of that total — and unseized fraud almost certainly pushes the real figure higher, EE Times reported , citing OECD data. Emily Newton, the article’s author, described the mechanism directly: “Most fraudulent chips today are sourced from e-waste.” That detail matters for anyone assuming counterfeit risk is limited to obscure brokers selling old stock. Scavenged chips have their original markings laser-polished off and are relabelled with high-specification part numbers before re-entering the market as new components — a relabelling process invisible to a visual inspection and undetectable without traceability documentation. Stay ahead on electronics news Join the electronics industry Astute Engineer newsletter Hardware-level defences are emerging, slowly Hardware root of trust — a cryptographic key fabricated directly into the silicon, verifying firmware signatures at boot and halting the process on any mismatch — offers a structural defence rather than a procedural one. It cannot be relabelled away because it is physically part of the die. But deployment is still early, and patch management across the industry already takes roughly two months from disclosure to verified deployment, leaving a window in which unverified hardware can operate undetected. For Astute’s regulated customers, the practical takeaway is unchanged by the technology story: authorised channel sourcing remains the control that works today, while cryptographic verification matures as a second layer rather than a replacement.