Here's an off-the-wall idea, take it with a grain of salt :-)

Considering advancments is speed and proccessing capabilities since these chips were designed in, couldn't a person produce a suitable emulator on a DSPIC or an ARM and put it on a simmilar carrier board? 

If that were so, would such a product require the UL re-listing (and it's assosciated costs)?

-Denny

> 
> I just finished re-designing a product for a client that's been in
> production since 1985. It originally used a Rockwell R6501Q MPU. See
> where this is heading?
> 
> The client builds about 1500 of these units a year and for the past
> several years has been building them with a R6501J mounted on a
> carrier board to fit the old R6501Q quad inline holes. This assembly
> is a life-safety type device and changing the PCB layout would
> require a complete U.L. re-listing to the tune of about $80K. So we
> needed something that would "drop-in" and not require any software or
> PCB re-work. We were lucky to find the R6501J's and be able to adapt
> them to the old PCB design.


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