Crosstown Traffic: Sparkfun comments on fake FTDI chips, more info comes out
As I predicted yesterday, Sparkfun has now commented on the counterfeit FTDI problem. I had no doubt that their boards, like Adafruit’s, used genuine components… but you never know what can slip into the distribution stream from others:
As soon as we heard about it (from Twitter, of course), we immediately began assessing our product line for products which might be of concern. At the moment, we have about 30 individual products using the FT232 chip. We immediately crossed most of them off the list; our in-house assemblies are all produced using chips from reputable suppliers (like Mouser, Digikey, Future, etc.).
We have less visibility into assemblies that come pre-made to us, however, so we immediately set about testing them for vulnerability to this change. Testing is still ongoing, but our preliminary tests show that current stock is not affected. We already had the discussion with suppliers in the past regarding counterfeit chips (you may recall that we had a brush with this issue in the past), so we’re quite confident in the product we’re currently selling.