Kai:
Thanks for that discussion.

I would like to add that in some design circumstances it is advantages to get a reset very quickly. So the fast response of the chip may be desirable in some situations and not in others. Really depends to some degree on the application in hand.

The intersting thing about this thread is that it is quite common for chip company customers to develop a disdane for a certain manufacturer becasue some of their parts do not work in specific board designs. At one company I was with we had a very similar problem with 93C46 serial EEPROMs.

I think Erik alluded to the fact that they did go back to the engineering lab and ended up with new artwork for the board and had many (but not all) of the MC 1232 chips start to work. It is likely that with additional engineering and additional components added to the board that they could have seen the MC parts work OK. But sometimes there is an economic line that you have to draw and say "these work" -- "these do not"....thus "sorry vendor X".

In another situation I worked at a company in the '70s where we had 8085 boards populated with bunches of 1Kx4 SRAM chips. Chips from Intel, AMD, TI, Signetics, and others all worked great. The company purchasers however had their heart set on buying AMI parts because they were 60% of the cost of chips from other vendors. The boards worked great with AMI chips through production tests and field installation of the equipment. Unfortunately they randomly failed after that time. I got the job to figure out why. In this case a lot of engineering work was justified because there were many boards it the field and 1000's of AMI chips in stock in the parts crib. It took nearly 3 weeks of extremely hard work to find out that the AMI chips had a certain sensitivity to what happened on the data bus as a bi-directional bus buffer did a bus turnaround. The ECO for the fix took one cut and one jump to make a very small change to some control line timing but in the meantime AMI was almost history as a vendor for the company.

Michael