This is an unacceptable answer in my mind. It appears the LPC43XX RTC peripheral has a "chicken and egg" problem because there is no way to know if the RTC is running without reading a register (which is explicitly unapproved by the manual if it is not initialized first), and always initializing the RTC at every powerup resets the 32KHz oscillator, and the tick counter (inside of Chip_RTC_Init()), which causes the RTC to drift in the best case, and most likely even resets the date and time counters in the worst case. This makes the RTC peripheral basically useless! Isn't there some register that we CAN read to know whether or not the RTC is even running? We have traced a possible powerup issue that many of our units have in the field to this peripheral malfunctioning and either making the unit act like it does not want to power on (processor stalled when reading registers after unit left on shelf for a while and RTC battery drained), or long powerup delays, in excess of 20 seconds while the user is fumbling with the power to get the unit to do anything.
We are not looking for a solution with an oscilloscope. We need a solution to detect whether or not the RTC is running, and NOT have the CPU stall when it checks registers of an uninitialized RTC. We also cannot initialize the RTC at every powerup, as that would erase or corrupt the date and time. A solution with reading the REGFILE has been proposed, but those registers are in the RTC domain, and reading them without initializing the RTC first MAY cause the processor to stall!
What say you, NXP?