Hello, I ordered some edo memory chips from utsource, they should have looked like this
Instead the products I received are like this:
The logo is different for sure, I suspect they are relabelled\fake chips.
Can you please provide any advice?
Thanks
This appears to be a fake marking, as ICSI chips are designated IC4116256 or IC4116257. This means that there could be anything under the paint. My experience ordering SRAM showed that three or four different types with different access times could be hidden under the guise of a single chip. About a quarter of the total number turned out to be defective or had inappropriate specifications. But the rest were fine. It's a Chinese lottery.
brotherdg2@gmail.com wrote on 2026-03-17, 14:20:This appears to be a fake marking, as ICSI chips are designated IC4116256 or IC4116257. This means that there could be anything under the paint. My experience ordering SRAM showed that three or four different types with different access times could be hidden under the guise of a single chip. About a quarter of the total number turned out to be defective or had inappropriate specifications. But the rest were fine. It's a Chinese lottery.
Sorry for asking but are you sure we are talking about the same kind of chips? I'm not sure if edo ram can be defined as sram. On top of that I really wouldn't know how can I test them to verify they are really 35ns, I have a virge card with sockets but they would be just tested to see if they work fine or not (since the clock is around 55 mhz).
I also found that actually ISSI has swapped the logo in the year 2000, in fact the tech specs pdf file are available with both logo:
https://www.alldatasheet.com/view.jsp?Searchw … =IS41C16256-35K
That doesn't change the fact that they can still be fake though.
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
I've only seen ICSI chips with that logo, and they were distinguished by the letter - C instead of S.
I've seen that logo on working chips. "ICSI"
I've seen both types of logoes on both DRAMs and SRAMs that were ostensibly genuine ISSI product.
What can anyone say, really? It has to be the messiest brand out there. Also, often the only thing you can source in quantities.
And then I bought a stack of supposed Winbonds a while ago and a few of them still had ISSI product IDs etched into their undersides. It's not like other stuff is necessarily clean either these days.
As it happens I was sorting and testing ISSI SRAMs on one of my workspaces just the other day, and here's what that looks like. 30+ 128K x 8s, 5 outright broken and a few others not making the rated 15ns.
I no longer worry about any of these being counterfeit, really. They're all suspect. I just need to find out whether there is actual silicon inside it, it's actually the expected type of chip, and it works well enough to survive 4-12 passes of memtest.
