However carefully your supply chain is managed, the realities of providing customers with on-time delivery, combined with the ease of internet searches, can lead you, or your suppliers, into the grey market. Counterfeiting issues are not just limited to expensive or exotic components, where relatively high unit cost would appear to be highly attractive to the criminal element. Counterfeiting often exists for long lead-time or obsolete devices with unit values below $10 per unit. These low value devices are arguably far more dangerous to the production quality of board level assemblers, with tremendous risk and negative impact to their business reputation, in addition to the cost of identifying assembly problems and doing the follow-on rework and repair.
Nordson DAGE's nano-focus X-ray inspection system provide high magnification at oblique views and with large greyscale sensitivity to quickly and easily non-destructively see inside the suspect packages. By taking images of known good samples that clearly indicate the correct wiring and sub-assembly alignment within the packages then production operators and incoming inspectors can quickly compare these to suspect devices.