Chip manufacturer releases report providing information on cloned chips for printer cartridges, emphasising that it is not just the cartridge itself that people should be wary of.
In a report developed by PowerVip Management, the company recognises that while efforts have been made by ETIRA and other remanufacturing associations to inform and warn the industry about clone cartridges present in the market, little has been said about the issue of clones in chip technologies.
As a result, PowerVip has issued a report, ‘Clones for Microcontrollers & Chips’, aimed at informing the remanufacturing industry about how to recognise clone chips and help uncover clone chip suppliers, using PowerVip’s knowledge of the chip manufacturing industry.
The report details the two different types of chips that are found in cartridges – Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips, which are custom-designed, dedicated to a specific function and require a big start-up investment to manufacture; and Microcontroller Unit (MCU) chips, which are bought from an open market and then programmed for general purposes such as printer cartridges and telecommunications.
PowerVip states that while ASIC chips are suitable for manufacturing in large volumes such as for HP printers, MCU chips are better suited for smaller products such as chips for Samsung, Lexmark and Epson cartridges, with initial investment needed for engineering, assembling and programming, but not for the manufacture of the chip itself.
The report also warns that chips with a “big black dot” that can appear to be ASIC chips could in fact be MCU chips with a plastic cover.
PowerVip explains how it decided to test lots of MCU chips after noticing an increasing number of cheap prices on the market from Asian competitors to see of the companies were doing something better. The company claims that many of the MCU chips were discovered to not be original and that the competitors had not “achieved more efficiency or got lower rates by buying large quantities”, thus concluding that the chips were clones.
Drawing upon its findings, PowerVip emphasises the need for businesses in the industry to decide carefully on who supplies their chips, and that “if everybody knows and recognises that there are clone cartridges, it is now time to reveal that there are also clone MCUs”.
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