Comment Re:No FDTI (Score 1) 572
You very clearly didn't see the die exposure article.
The counterfeit chip is in fact WAY more complex. It's not off the shelf, so to speak. They custom-modified. It's obvious once you start looking at the physical silicon.
Oh, Khyber, Khyber... when will stop pretending to know things? It's "off the shelf" in the sense that they didn't have to design anything... they just grabbed an existing microcontroller design and added an extra module or two to it. tibit didn't say that it was cheaper because it's less complex; he said it's cheaper because, "Whoever packages it didn't have to do all the silicon and driver R&D." Just like there are software libraries that a software developer can grab and use without having to do a lot of work, there are hardware libraries that hardware designers can grab and use without having to do a lot of work. You need to do some AES encryption? No need to design that yourself; grab an AES core. You need to do some low-pass digital filtering? Get a filter core. There's even a site that has open-source hardware cores you can use: OpenCores