UK court says Chinese operation must sell Scottish chip biz stake without delay The High Court of Justice in the UK has rejected a plea from a China-owned operation for a temporary injunction on a government order requiring it to sell its stake in a Scottish chip design business. The London court this month handed down a judgment refusing an application for interim relief from FTDI Holding Ltd, while a …
Given that The USA is in cahoots with Putin to hand him chunks of Europe in return for personal loans to a corrupt president who avoided impeachment because it is a vote not a legal process...
Maybe we should think a bit more carefully about who the "enemy" is in decisions of national security.
China is Trump's enemy (since he wants to reclasify Putin as a friend, and needs an enemy of some sort) it's not clear to me that China is anything but a good trading partner to the rest of us.
Or they can’t find GBP£12m towards an extension for an advanced flu vaccine manufacturing facility Liverpool, but can find underwrite GBP£2.5bn to save UKsteel manufacturing (a money pit, though critical base manufacturing) and fund the millions to do an assessment/review of whether USB C should be the national charging standard … long after everyone else already got there….or GBP£1bn towards supporting chip fabrication.. long after that ran away/offshored and unable to compete against US CHIPS and EU equivalent.
Brain dead thinking.
Seems unpopular but I agree, I can't see what IP FTDI have that makes this a national security issue, the IP doesn't seem particularly special, there's dozens of USB to various interface chips but that's about it and I don't see much if anything that's not available from other vendors
I worked with the founder in the 1980s when I first came over to California. He was a very clever hardware designer who eventually moved back to Glasgow with this idea to build a USB to serial converter chip. I didn't see the purpose of this at the time (what did I know?) but years later I found it was ubiquitous, being used in just about every embedded board that needed a download and diagnostic interface. (Implementing USB directly wasn't an option until recently due to the complex and idiosyncratic nature of USB.)
The fellow eventually left Glasgow for Singapore with his family. When we made contact relatively recently I didn't ask after the company but I figured it was probably doing steady, if not stellar, business. Its the sort of part that would eventually become part of a portfolio, which apparently it has. At this point one has to ask what is it that's so critical that the UK government regards it as strategically important (especially as its been cloned more than once). Its got that 'clutching at straws' feel.
Everything. Or, well, just about anything. FTDI chips do USB-Serial, USB-HMI, USB-multiprotocol, and a bunch of other things. All over the world, all over a massive number of industries.
And in many circles it's seen as the 'proper' USB-to-serial solution, versus the 'cheap, chinese' solutions of the PL2303 or CH340- often a holdover from the days when the FTDI drivers came with Windows and just worked but the others didn't.
They're in cars, medical equipment, robotics, servers, peripherals, weapon systems, Arduino kits that get plugged into the private machines of all sorts of people, and more. I'm pretty sure I've had them in a lava lamp and a sofa, they've definitely been in security equipment I've used.
A trusted supplier of these is required for an endless list of devices and industries. They are a surprisingly key bit of electronics.
It'd be like if we had a world-leading chip design company in the country and it was scheduled to be sold to a foreign power- such a situation would surely be stopped by the courts or government in a heartbeat.
I ran into this with some RS232-USB cables that stopped working, probably because they had knockoff chips in them. Its one of those fixes that leaves a bad taste in the mouth -- I can understand FTDI wanting to protect their IP but attempting to brick competing product was (IMHO) rather unethical. This part was not only rapidly becoming a commodity but also the entire notion of a USB to RS232 translator was gradually becoming obsolete as it was becoming possible to incorporate USB support directly onto hardware.
I'd object to the notion 'counterfeit chip', BTW. Its possible that someone could physically copy the circuitry on the chip but its more likely that they wouldn't bother because what the part is doing is well specified in both the USB and serial standards (its not strictly RS-232 because the voltage levels are logic rather than the higher voltage serial line levels used in a real serial port). The best way to describe competing parts is 'clones'. The other part of FTDI's portfolio are the Wnidows drivers, though -- they're well thought out and implemented and it would be OK with me if the clone makers also had to make and support their own drivers.
They weren't even "counterfeit" - they were just cheap microprocessors implementing USB-RS232(ish)
The issue was that at one point Microsoft's driver looked for FTDI's device-id before it loaded the totally generic USB-serial driver, so some uProc versions started reporting FTDI's id
Then Microsoft did the patch that bricked all the non-FTDI devices and everyone just switched to CH340 and dodgy drivers from chines language only download sites
> Microsoft's driver looked for FTDI's device-id ...
> loaded the totally generic USB-serial driver...
> Then Microsoft did the patch...
The driver wasn't Microsoft's, it was written by FTDI for the FTDI devices, so, yes, it looks for their device ids: worth it, as the FTDI devices have reliable implementation of all the extra signals in RS232/etc as well as I2C and GPIO (depending upon the chip used).
FTDI was solely responsible for the brick-a-fake (and they were fakes - reporting back as FTDI and sold as containing FTDI). Their driver arrives via Microsoft's servers, as do other manufacturers, because they went through the process to get them there. Unlike the purveyors of CH340 etc.
The "bricking" was a stupid thing to do and was rolled back soon after.
I'd be angrier about it if it wasn't so easy, as the end user, to bring your fakes back to life: all that happened was that the id had been set to all zeroes, using AFAIK the same process by which they had been set to the FTDI ids.
As for dumping FTDI devices - not anywhere where I was. Their chips are better than the alternatives - which is why we want to keep them in Scotland. Just so long as they don't try to give out any more Glasgow Kisses to our cables!
> I'd object to the notion 'counterfeit chip', BTW
When FTDI's driver overwrote the id bytes in the counterfeits, a lot of end users found they'd been sold devices which were advertised as containing FTDI parts - but clearly didn't. Despite the markings, which also caught out (some of) the sellers and manufactures.
So, yes, counterfeit.
FTDI's action, giving your cable a Glasgow Kiss instead of just refusing to work, was - not a good idea.
But we did find out why a few cables didn't actually work properly - some of the fakes didn't properly implement all the control lines, so they'll do the basic serial transfer but won't trigger your board to go into program update mode.
If the Chineese own it, and the nrits don't want them to own it, then they should simply take all the fab equipment to the local council tip, smash it and drop it off for recycling.
That way the owners gen an appropriate tax break, the government gets what they want. It's win win..
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