After more investigation the normal microcontroller issues apply.
1. The LPC 1788 does pulse the output for 1.6 uS following a watchdog timeout with our clock configuration
2. The reason not seen on the scope is that we had this output driving a RC watchdog input to an Ethernet PHY.
3. The Phy requires 60uS reset pulse which therefore needs a capacitor ie > 50 nF.
4. This means that following reset the current drain on the RSTOUT pin exceeds the device capability .
5. If the cap is changed for 1nf then the pulse can be clearly seen.
A further difficulty is that as soon as the processor has reset it starts u-boot and then Linux . In u- boot the processor tries to talk to the PHY which is not yet ready as the PHY reset time is > than the cpu. The result is that u-boot can not complete and the system hangs . The end product is electronic access control doing millions of transactions per month so an edge device hanging causes extreme end user frustration as you can’t open the door .
The only way I found this was to simulate the schematic on LTSPICE .
And spend a full day testing .
Now the problem is defined the next step is to design a pulse stretcher and also change u-boot to have a 100ms delay on startup.