[jeffbee]

So, I've never done anything where lives and health are on the line, but I've built tons of stuff out of salvaged space-age transistors. What's particularly wrong with refurbishment as a practice? There is a lot of good material out there, much of which is no longer made and has no contemporary equivalent.

[ndiddy]

The issue is that the process of refurbishment is fairly hard on the components. Companies in China will obtain decades old ewaste boards and then have workers hold the boards over fires to melt the solder and pull the chips out with pliers. The chips are then sanded, "blacktopped" (covered in a tar-like coating that looks like the IC plastic), and re-marked. This crude process (exposure to extreme heat, no controlling for ESD, etc) can result in chips that have latent defects, on top of the unknown age and uptime of the chips. Another issue is that companies will commonly lie on the re-marking, doing stuff like changing the grade from consumer to military spec, lowering the access time, upgrading the die revision, or mislabeling the chip entirely. For example, Amiga and Atari ST fans have had issues buying Motorola 68060 chips from Asian vendors, as they will commonly relabel 68LC060 chips (which don't have an FPU) as regular 68060 chips.

More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k72SFBOZ_lw

[jeffbee]

Thanks. That wasn't what I was imagining. I was imagining disassembling a retired aircraft (or other thing) and putting the parts back in inventory, not sourcing vaguely recovered parts from god-known-who.

[trevyn]

"Solid-state" components aren't. Electromigration is real. A used IC is physically different than a newly manufactured one.

[goatherders]

Nothing is wrong with PROPER refurbishment.

The first problem is a lot of refurbs are poorly done. I've had parts that were literally something else with a different print on them. Entire controllers that were marked as X but were Y in reality.

The second problem is the buy side. Government especially has regulations for quality control and counts on suppliers to do their part. Check out MVP Micro for a company a decade or so ago where the owners were profiteering off refurbs and wound up in prison.