> The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason.
ST has good documentation most of the time, but for a while some of their higher end MCUs had a lot of weird bugs and errata that were simply not documented. I haven’t used any of their modern parts recently but I’ve heard the situation has started improving. I have some friends who were ready to abandon ST altogether after losing so much time on a design to undocumented bugs and parts not behaving as documented.
I don't think I've ever used a ST part without reporting a bunch of datasheet errors.
I haven't been bit by an undocumented silicon bug, but I step on documented STM32H7 bugs on a pretty regular basis and there are some poor design decisions around the OCTOSPI (in addition to bugs) that make me avoid it in almost every situation.
But at least they document (mostly correctly) the registers to talk to their crypto accelerator unlike the Renesas and NXP parts I looked at as potential replacements, both of which needed an NDA to get any info about the registers (although they did supply obfuscated or blob driver layers IIRC).
I got very wary of ST when some of their STM32C chips that were rated for -40C consistently stopped working correctly for me at -20C, and their support response was basically a big shrug.
ST has good documentation most of the time, but for a while some of their higher end MCUs had a lot of weird bugs and errata that were simply not documented. I haven’t used any of their modern parts recently but I’ve heard the situation has started improving. I have some friends who were ready to abandon ST altogether after losing so much time on a design to undocumented bugs and parts not behaving as documented.