Here, we have dozens of small and large manufacturers, yet have only three or four distributors.

Judging from what you tell me, I'd be very hesitant to recommend anyone move any production to Europe at all.

In the case of passives, I'd say it's important to check (1) that the reels actually are populated (I had one distributor send me unpopulated reels, i.e. where the tape was empty.) (2) that it contains approximately the correct quantity of components, and (3) that a sample of these parts are of the correct value and behave as expected. (I once received reels of resistors, marked 1 k-ohm, but containing 1 M-ohm.)

If such items ever came to be an issue it would warrant testing, but, it's the manufacturer's, and not the distributor's responsibility to ensure that his specifications are met. If a lot were to be delivered that failed to meet those spec's the lawyers would see to it that the mfg paid for their replacement and the refurbishment of the units in which they were installed.

With voltage regulators, (I once had a lot of 1K regulators come in, of which not one regulator was within specified Vout tolerance.) Technicians were available to test 'em because production was stopped until we found parts that worked.

When you're using a small quantity, as I personally do in my very low-volume (almost always fewer than 12 units) business, I have to be assured that when I install a component, it functions properly. I'm not sure about the economics, though. It seems to me that if one is going to test 805x types, one has to ensure that they'll execute every instruction properly with every status bit in every possible state. They also have to execute every instruction properly on every possible content of 'A' and probably should operate properly on and in both internal and external memory. I/O testing is another issue, but certainly serial port loopback would be a reasonable test. For me, with my low volume, it's worth running a test that takes 4-5 minutes per MCU just to ensure that the parts in my parts bins function properly. For someone who uses only a few parts as I do, I imagine that's also true. For someone like Erik, who doesn't even bend over to pick up an MCU if it's dropped on the floor (probably wise, since the fine-pitch pins are probably bent), replacing 100 units of his product is probably not an issue, since he's shipping 10M/year. For him, if a unit "breaks" after a week or two, it's just a field service problem. For me, it's a tragedy, because even one failure per decade impacts my reputation. For me, it's like it is for NASA, since they, too, have "issues" with repairing something once it's deployed.

I have to conclude from this thread that most 805x users just don't test the parts they receive, preferring, instead, to trust their suppliers. When I was learning to survive in the electronics design/development business, there were many distributors and nearly every component had "second-source" vendors. If TI's part didn't have a good local distributor, well, Signetics, Fairchild, Motorola, OKI, or NEC had one. Today, the only label available on "that" part is Philips. If you want to buy it, you have to go through their distributor, despite the fact that he's the one who, two decades ago, clearly attempted to cheat you by short-shipping your order and substituting resistors for the capacitors you ordered.

RE