One thing to note on the photo above is the very clear "SHARP" stamped over the top of the manufacturer designations on the integrated circuits. Perhaps Sharp did this to make themselves responsible for their calculator if somehow it ended up outside of Japan and was discovered by MITI or worse yet, by US representatives of IC companies such as Texas Instruments or Fairchild. If this was the case, it was a pretty weak attempt, as is visible in the close-up photo below, where, even when SHARP was clearly stamped, the Mitsubishi diamond-star logo could clearly be seen, and in one case, the ink/paint that Sharp used either smeared when it was applied, or was perhaps wiped off by someone using a solvent of some type to see what was underneath the SHARP stamping. In that case, the Mitsubishi logo is again very clearly visible, as well as Mitsubishi's part number, M2140.

Giant US semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments was particularly picky about their IC designs, and did not want the Japanese IC manufacturers to make any chips that even had a passing resemblance to the design used by Texas Instruments (TI) to fabricate their planar-desig bipolarn ICs. TI was also very reluctant to grant any Japanese company license to make ICs using TI's designs, though it had granted license to Philips in the Netherlands to make chips using TI's process. It was of paricular concern to Mitsubishi, who made the ICs that Hayakawa Electric (Sharp) used in the Compet 31, because Mitsubishi's legal advisors strongly advised corporate leadership that under no circumstance should a calculator with thier chips in end up anywhere but in the domestic Japanese market. Mitsubishi's management was fearful of the possible ramifications, and made a formal request to Hayakawa Electric not to sell any calcualtor that had Mitsubishi-made chips in it outside of Japan until all of the litigation in the US had been resolved.

It isn't known if Mitsubishi's concern was only due to the threat of litigation, which would certainly make for bad publicity at the least, and would likely end up being very expensive and time consuming, and could possibly end up with them having to shut down their manufacturing lines for the ICs until any conflict was resolved; or if there were perhaps aspects of the chips that they were selling had enough of a similarity to Texas Instruments' designs that they could be considered in violation of patents even though those aspects may have been developed completely independently without any knowledge of TI's bipolar TTL chip design processes.

It should be noted here that at least one example of a calculator is known to exist in Europe with Compet 30 badging and model/serial number tag indicating it is a model CS-30B, but contains the IC-based memory board, and also has a backplane chassis with a stamping (see photo below) indicating that it has a model CS-31A. This is quite baffling, and only suppositions can be made in terms of why this particular calculator ended up this way.

There are a number of possible explanations for this oddity. One reason could be that the Compet 31 badging and model/serial number tags were not yet ready when the production line changed over to using the Compet 31 backplane and IC-based memory board. Other than the change in the backplane and the memory board, along with the badging, there is no other difference between the Compet 30 CS-30B and the Compet 31(CS-31A). If that were the case, it may be that the production line just used the existing Compet 30 badging, and the CS-30B Model/Serial number tag, continuing the serial number sequence as if the machines were Compet CS-30Bs. Once the badging and model/serial number tags stating Compet 31/CS-31A were ready, the line started using them. Another possibility is that this might have an attempt by Sharp to get by MITI's moratorium on the export of IC-based devices by disguising IC-based machines with the existing model number of calculators that did not have integrated circuits in them. The Compet 30 Model CS-30B was entirely made of discrete components and thus would not have fallen within MITI's export ban. This trick may have been used to allow the sale of Compet 31's, which were priced $200 less at retail than the CS-30B due to the reduction in cost associated with the use of integrated circuits. This may have allowed Sharp to export the calculators and sell them at an ever better competitive price outside of Japan than other competitors, generating extra revenue that otherwise wouldn't be available. At the time, 70% of Sharp's calculator revenue came from export products. It this was the case, it was a rather sneaky, but clever way to skirt the export ban put in place by the Japanese government.

The CS-31A uses 28 small-scale bipolar integrated circuits made by one of the earliest Japanese integrated circuit manufacturers, Mitsubishi. The devices, which have part number M2340, are in plastic dual-inline packages, and are fabricated with TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) construction. Each package contains four two-input NAND gates, very similar to the first of Texas Instruments' famous 7400-series TTL ICs, the SN7400. Only the memory circuit board of the thirteen circuit boards in the Compet 31 uses integrated circuits, with the rest of the boards utilizing the same discrete transistor construction as in the Compet 30. The logic gates in the ICs are connected in such a way that they create flip flops that take the place of the transistor-based flip flops that make up the memory register in the Compet 30, significantly reducing the component count and complexity of this board as well as reducing the retail price of the calculator by approximately $200US.