[tschwimmer]

One other question is: how accurate are the data sheets in Shenzhen as opposed to in the US? I can't speak to China, but in the US if you publish a spec for a component and then don't deliver within that spec, you will get sued, and you will lose.

[throwup238]

It really depends on the component. Something complex like a processor or radio will probably have errata in newer datasheets that fix errors in previous versions and those might take longer to make it out (especially if it’s someone like Qualcomm which doesn’t share all errata to all customers grumble grumble). Depending on how bad the error is and what you’re doing, that could be show stopping after you’ve sunk tons of NRE into it (DMA bugs on STM32 in the 2010s come to mind).

The provenance of the component is also really important. If it’s a ghost shift at a contract manufacturer producing the parts, they might have skimped on some part of the process (like packaging so that another subcontractor responsible for that step isn’t alerted) and the datasheet might be significantly inaccurate. I don’t know if these manufacturers ever bother to characterize their ghost shift parts enough to release their own datasheet but I assume it happens with especially popular parts. If the contract manufacturer loses the contract but keeps the ghost shift, they might be significantly out of date in revisions so you’d have to be careful to use only the datasheet they provide and not the one your engineers download from the first Google result (good luck!). In short, it’s complicated.

The most infamous example is probably the FTDI serial to usb chips that have been counterfeited for many years with varying quality, both by ghost shifts and manufacturers who reverse engineered the design to some degree.

[TeMPOraL]

They are making these chips, so I'd say quite accurate, or else someone in the US will get sued by someone else in the US.

[chabska]

In Shenzhen if your product doesn't perform up to spec, you just lose customers and go bankrupt. Not sure why the court has to be involved here. Isn't a free market capitalism economy supposed to work like that?

[wakawaka28]

Chinese companies violate many of the norms that we take for granted, such as labelling things accurately. If a Chinese company makes things out of spec, it will not put its name on the product. If one of these companies does knowingly make an inferior product, a new brand/company might be formed just for that purpose. Also, free market capitalism works better with a means to enforce contracts such as the contents of spec sheets, because it speeds up accounting for deliberate bad behavior. Court proceedings establish facts that can communicate to the public what the company has been up to, versus possibly misleading rumors. Although the free market can eventually sort out bad information and unreliable actors, it works much better when information standards are enforced. False advertising wastes a lot of resources.