I was never involved in this, but an old boss used to be in the synthesizer business and mentioned it was quite "cut throut". To protect their designs, they would sometimes buy special lots of chips and have the origional manf label removed and theirs placed on it, I guess the idea was to make ti look like an ASIC or such and confuse any design thieves. I remeber him telling me about one design that used a resistor network chip with the label replaced.

Andy