Another possibility is that these were scrapped/rejected units that escaped destruction at Maxim, and ended-up being sold, obviously illegally, and wound-up in products.
It does seem odd to me that someone would go to the bother, not to mention the expense, of copying an inexpensive part and selling it. ------------------------------------------------------ You wouldn't believe the hassles I had to go thru to get an 8-inch 'souvenir' wafer of a chip I worked-on that was never taken into production. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/71c0c466-530a-4c6b-8fbe-2eb634415cc2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
