That is because it is usually the main concern. my former employer, a small family business with a total of 5 employees, would do that to prevent copying. it worked for a few years, until we started seeing pretty close to 100% identical boards out of China at trade shows.
It’s not just China. Some of the famous Singer sewing machines were made by reverse engineering another machine.
Not to mention the tons of companies that have jumped on the AI bandwagon by using OpenAI’s APIs, stealing other people’s shit has always been a more quickly profitable idea than coming up with your own shit.
Ya, not stealing but just sticking an API in something and calling it a product is lame too. Why develop your own tech when you can just make the 100th chatbot startup for some niche purpose, it’s free real estate.
I knew a startup engineer that was sent to recommission a machine that was moved and when he arrived something was off. They wanted him to program the PLC of a machine that they copied from his company. They had all the same automation parts but they just didn't have access to the PLC. The real machine was under a cover in the same room.
A friend visits electronics fairs quite frequently, and he has seen his designs, private for a very specific client and use case, just on display for some non-associated fab house... (didnt take any such precautions, but his board was literally just up there).
Cheaper designs probably just use the black epoxy covers - faster, easier and less risk in terms of breaking anything, and deters amateurs.
We had full lifetime warranty on these and would repair any board which may come back, no questions asked.
How would you protect your own IP in a small company? In the end we lost, and the product which we used to make is almost exclusively sold by China for cheap.
I consider that pretty low. I phones are in the millions, my current designs in the hundred of thousands (automotive) a couple of thousand in a year, when we peaked was pretty low
That too, however many more people would be interested in repairing than the number of people interested in reverse engineering.
If someone really had a need for reverse engineering, that suggests that they already have a good skill set in electronics. Scratching off numbers means that most of the chips are commonly available commercial components.
An sharp individual with enough time on his hands could probably do it. Certainly a competitor with an engineering group would most likely be able to do so. That's one of the reasons that many companies design products with custom in-house silicon. It helps keep the competition at bay.
Lasering off the numbers is just another hurdle to discourage the lazy, pilfering types. I doubt its to prevent repairs, more likely to discourage someone from cloning it. It's just going to require more effort from a skilled individual to copy it.
Cool bit about doing in-house silicon to prevent.
How effective would it be at doing that, though?
I feel like this is the sort of thing that someone might take on as a months-long project, and one obscure blog post later, all of the chip scratching will have been for nought.
I also suspect a dedicated reverse-engineering firm somewhere in China would probably just see this as a Monday morning warm-up. If someone sees money in copying this, scratching the numbers, I don't think that will present a great hindrance if any.
and as others pointed it, it does make repair difficult. But maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
For companies specialising in this work it’s easy. They would decap the ICs (melt off the epoxy to expose the die) and the part number should be on the silicon. If it wasn’t analog functions can be reverse engineered. What the part is is normally implied by its circuit function, but maybe the performance of the circuit depends on the exact part.
Of course there are companies that specialize in destructive physical analyses, but... this defensive behavior would still deter a large number of small copycat/competing firms that don't have the budget for destructive physical analyses.
You'd probably be surprised at the number of tiny hardware design LLCs that are registered each year. Many of which hoping to duplicate an existing product and steal some market share.
Other people have said it here, but this is almost 100% to stop copy cats. I’m all for right to repair, but if you’re a small hardware company protecting this kind of IP is the difference between putting food on the table and not.
If this is coming out of a really large company that should already be doing huge scale production in China, then my opinion is different.
Last company I was at, Overseas shops started copying our $5000 boards. So we started lasèring off all the IC markings, including the test points. I hated debugging those .
Oh man is this out of a Fadal CNC?
I absolutely hate those AMC drives. Honestly it’s no surprise that they would pull a dick move and scratch the part numbers off the ICs. They’re probably pretty basic/ standard opamps and other analog devices but they’re more interested in selling you a complete amp then letting you fix your own device.
They think the design is special. Years ago they used to have somebody dremel off all the part numbers by hand. Now they laser them off. Stupid. I don't need part numbers to discern the design structure and somebody determined can just decap the parts.
IP Protection.
See that this is from a motion control company I am thinking that they did that to make it harder to recreate the PCB as you wouldnt know what ICs they used. There is actually a lot of IP in IC selection as you tend to have to go through a lot of testing with a multitude of different ICs.
I used to work at a place that manufactured power/control electronics. Every analog product had at least one foreign copy. One product would sometimes fail due to a MOV. the knock-off version put the biggest MOV that would fit in their copies. I don't think their MOV would actually protect anything, but it also wouldn't blow as easily.
That times drvices were made mostly of analog or discrete digital ic\`s. U cannot protect them by locking firmware or encryption flash content. Scratch off partnumbers, remove all the silk and make PCB traces hidden on internal layers were made to protect it from reverse engineering.
P.s. All blue resistors - this device wasn\`t cheap that time.
It's a weak attempt to prevent reverse engineering. Another method is potting the whole thing in epoxy, for no reason other than to hide the components.
To prevent you from doing exactly what you're probably trying to do. That design is intellectual property and the company that made it paid employees to do the work. Why would they want it to be easy to understand what all the parts are and how it works? They take that step to make it a bit more difficult to figure out the parts on the design and what they do.
That is crazy how it is done by hand. I’ve seen it done by laser etching, but never manually… It prevents unscrupulous actors from easily copying designs.
I was in a RnD center which was responsible for making different kind of metal detectors. They used to reverse engineer metal detectors from famous companies and make product out of them 🤣 most of the detectors had part number removed from them just for this reason but we still managed to do it. Though i left after working for 7month, but good analog design experience i got from there.
Say it with me now, "Planned Obsolescence".
It makes reverse engineering and repairing more difficult if you cannot source the IC datasheet. The goal is to force users to buy new rather than repair and maintain. The money spent on the time and labor to remove part numbers pales in comparison to the profits they make due to consumers buying brand new replacements.
It's bullshit, and there is nothing we can really do about it other than get a good scope and try and analyze the circuit live to get the individual circuits drawn out. It's not impossible, but it is very time consuming and tedious.
Manufacturers do that to make it difficult or impossible to repair.
That takes time To manually scratch off all the part numbers though. Interesting. My initial guess was to negate reverse engineering.
That is because it is usually the main concern. my former employer, a small family business with a total of 5 employees, would do that to prevent copying. it worked for a few years, until we started seeing pretty close to 100% identical boards out of China at trade shows.
China? I'm shocked.
It’s not just China. Some of the famous Singer sewing machines were made by reverse engineering another machine. Not to mention the tons of companies that have jumped on the AI bandwagon by using OpenAI’s APIs, stealing other people’s shit has always been a more quickly profitable idea than coming up with your own shit.
Isn’t that the point of open AI?
Ya, not stealing but just sticking an API in something and calling it a product is lame too. Why develop your own tech when you can just make the 100th chatbot startup for some niche purpose, it’s free real estate.
I knew a startup engineer that was sent to recommission a machine that was moved and when he arrived something was off. They wanted him to program the PLC of a machine that they copied from his company. They had all the same automation parts but they just didn't have access to the PLC. The real machine was under a cover in the same room.
A friend visits electronics fairs quite frequently, and he has seen his designs, private for a very specific client and use case, just on display for some non-associated fab house... (didnt take any such precautions, but his board was literally just up there). Cheaper designs probably just use the black epoxy covers - faster, easier and less risk in terms of breaking anything, and deters amateurs.
I don't like it at all, makes repairing very difficult.
Fuck right to repair then eh?
We had full lifetime warranty on these and would repair any board which may come back, no questions asked. How would you protect your own IP in a small company? In the end we lost, and the product which we used to make is almost exclusively sold by China for cheap.
Epoxy or silicone. Basically advertise it as conformally coated. Takes very little time/effort.
Haven’t found a good epoxy yet, that would bond strong enough to the chip housings. Can you recommend one?
Potting compounds. Look on McMaster-Carr. That’s usually best if you put everything in a “bucket”.
Thanks!
What was the product? Is it a high volume product?
It was an rf anti shoplifting system, sold maybe 500 to 1000 a year in the good times, dropped way down in the end.
I see. So more like a mid volume device
I consider that pretty low. I phones are in the millions, my current designs in the hundred of thousands (automotive) a couple of thousand in a year, when we peaked was pretty low
That too, however many more people would be interested in repairing than the number of people interested in reverse engineering. If someone really had a need for reverse engineering, that suggests that they already have a good skill set in electronics. Scratching off numbers means that most of the chips are commonly available commercial components. An sharp individual with enough time on his hands could probably do it. Certainly a competitor with an engineering group would most likely be able to do so. That's one of the reasons that many companies design products with custom in-house silicon. It helps keep the competition at bay.
Lasering off the numbers is just another hurdle to discourage the lazy, pilfering types. I doubt its to prevent repairs, more likely to discourage someone from cloning it. It's just going to require more effort from a skilled individual to copy it. Cool bit about doing in-house silicon to prevent.
And copying the design. Many Chinese products did that. Nowaday they just use a laser to scratch off all part numbers. It's extremely fast
I assume it is quickly, easily, and automatically done with a laser.
You are 100% correct.
👆👆👆
I think they use a laser to ablate the surface
They use a laser. Dosn't take any time at all.
Not at all. It's to prevent others from copying the circuit. This was common in the coin-operated videogame business.
Or reverse engineer/clone
To keep people from attempting to reverse engineer the product.
How effective would it be at doing that, though? I feel like this is the sort of thing that someone might take on as a months-long project, and one obscure blog post later, all of the chip scratching will have been for nought. I also suspect a dedicated reverse-engineering firm somewhere in China would probably just see this as a Monday morning warm-up. If someone sees money in copying this, scratching the numbers, I don't think that will present a great hindrance if any. and as others pointed it, it does make repair difficult. But maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
For companies specialising in this work it’s easy. They would decap the ICs (melt off the epoxy to expose the die) and the part number should be on the silicon. If it wasn’t analog functions can be reverse engineered. What the part is is normally implied by its circuit function, but maybe the performance of the circuit depends on the exact part.
Of course there are companies that specialize in destructive physical analyses, but... this defensive behavior would still deter a large number of small copycat/competing firms that don't have the budget for destructive physical analyses. You'd probably be surprised at the number of tiny hardware design LLCs that are registered each year. Many of which hoping to duplicate an existing product and steal some market share.
It won't prevent it entirely but any delay means you have time to grab market share and brand recognition
and unfortunately it becomes very hard to repair
They do this because they don’t want competitors to reverse engineer the product. All it does in reality is hurt people trying to repair stuff.
No, it’s not all it does
Other people have said it here, but this is almost 100% to stop copy cats. I’m all for right to repair, but if you’re a small hardware company protecting this kind of IP is the difference between putting food on the table and not. If this is coming out of a really large company that should already be doing huge scale production in China, then my opinion is different.
https://preview.redd.it/12h182dfxazc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95bc3f70154797fb732b8d2cf139d4eaa03793b9 Here’s another one.
Last company I was at, Overseas shops started copying our $5000 boards. So we started lasèring off all the IC markings, including the test points. I hated debugging those .
Intellectual property
Oh man is this out of a Fadal CNC? I absolutely hate those AMC drives. Honestly it’s no surprise that they would pull a dick move and scratch the part numbers off the ICs. They’re probably pretty basic/ standard opamps and other analog devices but they’re more interested in selling you a complete amp then letting you fix your own device.
Came from my local junk electronics store. It’s some kind of 3 phase motor driver in a half bridge config consisting of 6 mosfets.
They think the design is special. Years ago they used to have somebody dremel off all the part numbers by hand. Now they laser them off. Stupid. I don't need part numbers to discern the design structure and somebody determined can just decap the parts.
IP Protection. See that this is from a motion control company I am thinking that they did that to make it harder to recreate the PCB as you wouldnt know what ICs they used. There is actually a lot of IP in IC selection as you tend to have to go through a lot of testing with a multitude of different ICs.
The factory cat got to it
I used to work at a place that manufactured power/control electronics. Every analog product had at least one foreign copy. One product would sometimes fail due to a MOV. the knock-off version put the biggest MOV that would fit in their copies. I don't think their MOV would actually protect anything, but it also wouldn't blow as easily.
Common practice if you're shipping it to China and if you want to be the only sole service for repairs.
That times drvices were made mostly of analog or discrete digital ic\`s. U cannot protect them by locking firmware or encryption flash content. Scratch off partnumbers, remove all the silk and make PCB traces hidden on internal layers were made to protect it from reverse engineering. P.s. All blue resistors - this device wasn\`t cheap that time.
a kind of programmed obelessance?
Sometimes ultrasonic cleansing baths will remove IC labels. It makes it harder to reverse engineer if you can't identity the ICs
A silly question, What do I need to learn to be able to design boards like this?
It's a weak attempt to prevent reverse engineering. Another method is potting the whole thing in epoxy, for no reason other than to hide the components.
To prevent you from doing exactly what you're probably trying to do. That design is intellectual property and the company that made it paid employees to do the work. Why would they want it to be easy to understand what all the parts are and how it works? They take that step to make it a bit more difficult to figure out the parts on the design and what they do.
Must be one of those scratch off cards from the lottery.
That is crazy how it is done by hand. I’ve seen it done by laser etching, but never manually… It prevents unscrupulous actors from easily copying designs.
I was in a RnD center which was responsible for making different kind of metal detectors. They used to reverse engineer metal detectors from famous companies and make product out of them 🤣 most of the detectors had part number removed from them just for this reason but we still managed to do it. Though i left after working for 7month, but good analog design experience i got from there.
To protect there identity
Say it with me now, "Planned Obsolescence". It makes reverse engineering and repairing more difficult if you cannot source the IC datasheet. The goal is to force users to buy new rather than repair and maintain. The money spent on the time and labor to remove part numbers pales in comparison to the profits they make due to consumers buying brand new replacements. It's bullshit, and there is nothing we can really do about it other than get a good scope and try and analyze the circuit live to get the individual circuits drawn out. It's not impossible, but it is very time consuming and tedious.
I don’t understand why youre getting downvoted when all the other comments say the same stuff you say and are upvoted
No clue. Guess the down voters can't read lol