Z80 | 1976

Z80

Z80

 The Z80 is a CPU developed by Zilog, founded in 1974 by Federico Faggin and 11 other Intel employees who moved from Fairchild Semiconductor to Intel in 1970. It was released in 1976 and became the most widely used 8-bit CPU in the 1980s, utilized in many PCs and game consoles, and is still used in embedded systems today. Zilog produced various clones of the Z80, and clones were also manufactured in East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Since 1976, Zilog has produced various Z80 processors, but it announced the discontinuation of the Z80 series in April 2024. This marks the end of a 48-year run, with the last orders being accepted until June 14, 2024. Successors like the eZ80 and Z180 will continue to be sold.

The Z80 is popular in homebrew computers due to its ease of hardware creation and operating system development, and there are peripheral devices that assist in the production of Z80-based hardware. The Z80 is based on the Intel 8080, with a 16-bit memory address bus width supporting up to 64KB of memory. The Z180 expands the address bus width to 20 bits, allowing support for up to 1MB.

The Z80 includes 8-bit and 16-bit registers, with added features such as operations using index registers, memory refresh functionality, and enhanced interrupt control. After the Z80, Zilog released various products like the Z8000, Z180, and eZ80, but the 16-bit PC CPU market was dominated by Intel and Motorola.

Systems equipped with the Z80 include computers running the CP/M operating system and many 8-bit Japanese computers, and the Z80 was used in numerous arcade game boards. In the early to mid-1990s, the Z80 was also utilized in karaoke machines and Texas Instruments' scientific calculators. The Z80 is still widely used in embedded devices today and was commonly used in micro mouse competitions.

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