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CC2541: CC2541 counterfeit

Part Number: CC2541
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: CC2540

I have recently (last moth or so ) bought a few  HM-10 boards on Aliexpress  with an cc2541 mcu on board. To my great surprise, when trieing to program the chip with my own firmware,

the SmartRF flash Programmer software (connected to a CCdebugger) reports the chip as an CC2540 and not as CC2541 as expected.

My firmware is utilizing the I2C and therefore I can't use the board if it is indeed an CC2540 instead of cc2541.

My questions are:

1. Does TI or anybody else are aware of such possible issue (the chip on these boards are  marked with seemingly identical marking to chips on some HM-10 I bought in the past that works) ?

2. Is there a possibility/Application Note that utilize GPIOs   for I2C communication instead of the on chip I2C ?

3. Does anybody knows of a reliable source of HM-10 with real CC2541.

4. Is there a reasonable(cheap and programmable) alternative to the HM-10