Next-Gen Components Traceability Prevents Damage from Cyberattacks and Counterfeits or Refurbished Components
Next-Gen Components Traceability Prevents Damage from Cyberattacks and Counterfeits or Refurbished Components
Next-Gen Components Traceability: Did you lately try to purchase a new car, a new laptop, or a new phone, and you were told by the seller that you will need to wait for a few months because there are delivery issues? We are now two years into the COVID pandemic, and even as the effects of the virus wind down, the lockdowns and slow-downs worldwide have been affecting the manufacturing and transport of electronic goods. And why is it still happening? According to EPSNews [1], the effect of Covid-19 on the production of components will inflict an even more severe shortage than the 2017–2018 crisis. The entire market of electronics goods depends on the availability of the small building blocks of the PCB: the electronic components. When there is a shortage of electronic components, it acts like a snowball on the entire supply chain, thus affecting the availability of the final goods.
Next-Gen Components Traceability: People are waiting for months for their new cars
People are waiting for months for their new cars, laptop, washing machines, or cell phones—all because of missing a small chip from the stock. As a result, the gray market of counterfeit and refurbished components has become an even greater issue than it was before. When there is a vacuum of components, someone will see this as an opportunity and fill the gap. Of course, Electronic Manufacturing Suppliers (EMS) cannot take the risk of using counterfeit, refurbished, or non-authorized components. But until now, they did not really have a proper, scalable, and reliable way to ensure that their entire supply chain is authentic. Of course, there were some methods to minimize the exposure to problematic components. But none of them could really solve the issue. The first thing that OEMs did was to buy only from approved and known component suppliers. However, this was not enough. It still did not guarantee that all components were indeed authentic. In some cases, the supplier was unaware that the component they are selling is problematic. But more than that: in a period of low availability of components, limiting the supply chain manager to buy only from a small approved-supplier list made just-in-time supply more difficult. The second method was to send the reel to a lab for testing. But this could not solve the entire issue. In the lab, the test is done only on a sampling.
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