Hacker News Reader

Comment by amckenna | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is curious what a real vs fake FTDI chip looks like under the hood (de-capped chip) this is a great analysis and some beautiful pictures.

http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supere...

Exerpt:

"What's the economic reason of making software fake of well-known chip instead of making new one under your own name? This way they don't need to buy USB VID, sign drivers in Microsoft, no expenses on advertisement. This fake chip will be used right away in numerous mass-manufactured products. New chip will require designing new products (or revisions) - so sales ramp up will happen only 2-3 years later. Die manufacturing cost is roughly the same for both dies (~10-15 cents)."

View on HN

I've seen that one before but what caught my attention this time was the "(M)FTDI FEB 2005" line - the design is approaching 10 years old, and the significance of that is the fact that IC layouts ("mask work") are only protected for 10 years by copyright law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Chip_Protection_A...

It's also completely legal to reverse-engineer an existing IC to duplicate its functionality in a different manner, which the cloners have definitely done in this case - they are completely different.

So it appears that the only thing the fake FTDI chip is violating is the trademark "FTDI", which might not even have been put there by the fab that produced the die, since they're branded 'Supereal'.

+1 for the fake chip name. "Supereal" takes the cake

"Supereal" might not be the name of the fake itself, it might be just the name of the mask-programmable microcontroller they used.

"It seems that in this case Chinese designers implemented protocol-compatible "fake" chip, using mask-programmable microcontroller. This way they only needed to redo 1 mask - this is much cheaper than full mask set, and explains a lot of redundant pads on the die."

What is the HN crowd's preferred way of dealing with that kind of parasite?

If someone makes a compatible chip from scratch then they are not a parasite, they are a competitor.

Not if they label the "compatible chip" as the genuine ones.

But how is the driver to know what's written on the chip?

You mean how the driver tells the counterfeit apart? I don't really know. One possibility is that the counterfeit didn't copy some of the "don't care" cases exactly.

You completely missed the point. The driver cannot possibly know the difference between a chip falsely sold as being an FTDI chip, and one that is compatible without being mislabeled.

I got your point now. But then my comment was trying to point out that a "compatible chip" isn't really competing if its branding is deceitful. Whether it's possible for a driver to tell the difference between counterfeit and legitimate compatible chips isn't really relevant here.

Besides, any legitimate compatible chip vendor will need to have their own VID, which also means they need to develop their own compatible driver.

VIDs are not legally protected marks.

Unless there's a valid patent at issue (and nobody's mentioned a patent at all), there is nothing about the chips themselves that violates any law.

Defending vigilantism is disgusting enough when you have a colorable argument that the target of your act is the only one harmed, and is actually guilty of some sort of legal violation.

Here, however, you're defending vigilante destruction of the property of end-users who bought a product with a chip in it that, without the user's knowledge, may or may not have passed through the hands of someone who may or may not have labeled or described it deceptively.

The deceptive party may not even exist, and even if they do, they are not the victim of the vigilante justice. A user who may not have even heard of FTDI is the victim.

I agree that punishing the users of the product that contains the fake chip is a very bad idea.

Again, I'm merely trying to express my opinion that this way of making compatible chips is a very shady practice (and unlike that original comment I replied to was implying, typical market competition). Most users didn't choose the chip just because it's compatible and cheaper. They bought it thinking it's the legitimate FTDI chips with (very specific) guarantees from its manufacturer's datasheet.

> Most users didn't choose the chip just because it's compatible and cheaper. They bought it thinking it's the legitimate FTDI chips with (very specific) guarantees from its manufacturer's datasheet.

Eh....... Lots of people knew/know they are/were getting counterfeit chips. It's certainly shady, but if I were a chinese company making these, I'd simply not use the logo anymore and then sue the pants off FTDI.

Really? I can understand people might want to cheap out for personal projects. But there's no way I'll use it knowingly at work.

Ohh, I agree. I meant that a lot of the makers kind of knew about it. I doubt anyone would spec it in a BOM.

From FTDI's point of view, their driver's are not free, they are distributed for use by FTDI customers. FTDI doesn't want their drivers to run on non-FTDI chips regardless of whether they are marketed as real FTDI chips or not.

Counterfeit isn't the issue here so much as competing non-FTDI chips relying on FTDI to do the hard and expensive work of developing drivers for them.

Bricking non-FTDI hardware was extreme and guaranteed to make people angry. I wonder what the reaction would be if FTDI had instead made the driver not work on non-FTDI chips unless the end customer bought a license key from FTDI to use their drivers.

It'll be very interesting if they start making them as competitors now? I mean, they could.

This will not do wonders for FTDI's credibility. Indeed, it could very well put them out of business for good (from past experience), and we already know whoever's behind these clones can make a chip that does the job at a price people want…

Then any parasitism is restricted to trademarks rather than trade secrets, patents, etc. Who cares about trademarks?

After giving this some more thought, it's no longer clear to me that a simple {vendor, product} id pair is even "protected" by trademark. It would be protected by contract terms, especially if at some point in the supply chain someone had signed a contract with USB-IF. However it's quite clear that no entity is entitled to commit vandalism in order to enforce contract terms for a contract to which that entity is not even a party.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com