Counterfeit Electronics Education Hub
Understanding counterfeit electronic components — what they are, how they enter supply chains, what they cost, and how they are detected.
Pillars
What counterfeit electronic components are
Counterfeit and nonconforming electronic components: an ordered inspection sequence and a working taxonomy.
Pillar 2What counterfeit electronic components cost
The cost of counterfeit electronic components is not a single number. It accumulates across evidence uncertainty, verification overhead, emergency sourcing, rework, and field failure — with the largest and least-reported portion arising not from confirmed counterfeits but from managing evidence uncertainty at the procurement-lot level.
Pillar 3Procurement channels
How the route from manufacturer to buyer shapes the evidence available for a specific lot. The difference between authorized, independent, and open-market channels — and why channel type is a starting point for evidence assessment, not a verdict.
Pillar 4Why supplier qualification is not enough
Supplier qualification decides who may supply; it does not verify what is in a given lot. Why component integrity is a per-delivery question, and where CILM adds a lot-level layer.
Pillar 5Lot-level verification
How CILM selects verification depth for a specific procurement lot. The four-level L0–L3 scale as progressively deeper evidence acquisition, what each level addresses and what it misses, how criticality class adjusts the required depth, and how laboratory evidence re-enters the evidence chain.
Pillar 6Detection methods and their limits
What documentary, physical, and analytical methods for evaluating suspect electronic components can establish, what each cannot establish, and why no single result proves authenticity.
Pillar 7Measuring supply-chain risk
Why assessing a component or a supplier is not the same as assessing a specific procurement lot. How CILM measures risk as a consequence of evidence sufficiency, what the five factors address, and what the methodology produces as output.
Pillar 8The evidence base
An open, anonymised corpus of real pre-purchase procurement communications, published on IEEE DataPort. What the record actually contains, the research question it opens, how an earlier composite-risk annotation relates to the current CILM model, and what the corpus does not establish.
Pillar 9Standards landscape
The established standards that govern counterfeit-part avoidance, testing, and distribution, what each covers, and where CILM sits in relation to them — as a methodology that references these standards, not as a standard, a certification authority, or a conformity attestation.