title: Detection of counterfeit electronic components through ambient mass spectrometry and chemometrics.
abstract: In the last several years, illicit electronic components have been discovered in the inventories of several distributors and even installed in commercial and military products. Illicit or counterfeit electronic components include a broad category of devices that can range from the correct unit with a more recent date code to lower-specification or non-working systems with altered names, manufacturers and date codes. Current methodologies for identification of counterfeit electronics rely on visual microscopy by expert users and, while effective, are very time-consuming. Here, a plasma-based ambient desorption/ionization source, the flowing atmospheric pressure afterglow (FAPA) is used to generate a mass-spectral fingerprint from the surface of a variety of discrete electronic integrated circuits (ICs). Chemometric methods, specifically principal component analysis (PCA) and the bootstrapped error-adjusted single-sample technique (BEAST), are used successfully to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit ICs. In addition, chemical and physical surface-removal techniques are explored and suggest which surface-altering techniques were utilized by counterfeiters.
authors: Department of Chemistry, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. hieftje@indiana.edu.
authors: Kevin P
authors: KP
authors: Pfeuffer
authors: Jack
authors: J
authors: Caldwell
authors: Jake T
authors: JT
authors: Shelley
authors: Steven J
authors: SJ
authors: Ray
authors: Gary M
authors: GM
authors: Hieftje