"Jamie" wrote in message
...
wrote:

Have a Discovery 420 treadmill. On the upper PC board,
8 of the 9 ICs have the identification info removed; it
appears that the area which previously contained the ID
on each chip, had been irregularly abraded with a small
tool (such as a Dremel).

Seems time consuming for the board manufacturer to do
this on each board.

Why would a manufacturer do this?

to keep you from repairing it. most likely using common
components.
also it helps to keep others from duplicating the
product.


The thing is, it's fairly trivial for an engineer to identify the components
in most cases, particularly for IC's, it just makes it a lot harder to
service.