Whoever is in charge of sourcing for life-critical application and let the sketchy part slip in should be held responsible for it.
>the parts aren't "junk"
You don't know for sure. How likely is it that the manufacturer of the knock-off part performed full characterization of their chip to ensure they are within spec limits of the original manufacturer? What if the chip starts sending wrong bits when the temperature gets a bit high or voltage supply fluctuates somewhat? Don't you think getting disabled by driver might even be a less disastrous failure mode in this case?
Um... how exactly do you think the electronics business works, because it's nothing like what you just described. The vendor is often 3 to 5 times (or more) removed from the sourcing of individual components.
hah... Assuming the prototype is actually identical to the delivered product. People who want to skim money off the top aren't stupid, the prototype will probably contain the specified part and so will the first few lots. To insure validity of every part you need to test every part.
OK, let's run with this a bit. Seems simple enough if you make a single pcba, but what if you're a company like sony and your product has 8 different pcbas in it, some source from other companies and some designed an manufactured in house. Whose testing process should screen the counterfeit chips? If a violation is found, who is liable? Someone has to be, because there will be a cost to the end user when the things go belly up. Also, why the hell would anyone have thought to do this in the past? I work in testing and no one creates a QC process to check for fakes during the PCBA process. You don't test the chips when you're manufacturing the board, you test the integration. Doing a full functional verification of every component during PCBA is really dumb.
No matter how you slice it, this is lunacy. FTDI was extremely short sighted here and any competent engineer or product manager will see this as a sign to be weary of incorporating FTDI into future designs. You don't want your component manufacturers playing shady stuff like this. Supply chain management is complicated enough without having to worry about devices getting bricked weeks, months, or years after you've done the engineering work.
