Quoted from chickfisher68:Thank you barakandl . I ordered a fm1608 from marco and some used chips from china off ebay . I hope any chip works. Most of all I would like to fix the original problem of it not holding memory.
Those quantum trap NVRAM are a bit finicky. I tried to use one in the GTB sys 3 MPU that is not directly compatible with FM1608 and was having corruption issues at power up or down even with an extra cap.
The used pull FM1608 usually work okay. There is read/write endurance limit on the chip you don't know how much has been used up, but I really have never heard of one going bad in service that seems like an endurance issue, or any issue really. I asked Cypress why the endurance increased from a datasheet from 2004 vs 2016 or whenever the cypress rebranding came. They said the endurance rating is extremely conservative for worst case scenarios and in 2004 they where not ready to guarantee the life that they can now and the old date codes before the datasheet changed have the same endurance as the newer dated ones.
Give any used chip a good visual inspection. Sometimes you find a whisker of solder shorting two legs together that is hard to see.