Final week, chip producer Zilog introduced that after 48 years available on the market, its line of standalone DIP (twin inline bundle) Z80 CPUs is coming to an finish, ceasing gross sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 structure debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution at the side of CP/M, additionally serving as the center of the Nintendo Sport Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade recreation, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in numerous varieties.
In a letter to clients dated April 15, 2024, Zilog wrote, “Please be suggested that our Wafer Foundry Producer will likely be discontinuing help for the Z80 product and different product strains. Discuss with the hooked up listing of the Z84C00 Z80 merchandise affected.”
Designers sometimes use the Z84C00 chips due to familiarity with the Z80 structure or to permit legacy system upgrades with no need vital system redesigns. And whereas many different embedded chip architectures have outdated these Z80 chips in velocity, processing energy, and functionality, they remained go-to options for many years in merchandise that did not want any additional horsepower.
Zilog will proceed to fabricate the eZ80 microcontroller household, which was launched in 2001 as a sooner model of the Z80 collection and is available in completely different bodily bundle configurations (pin layouts).
Powering a microcomputer revolution
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor was designed in 1974 by Federico Faggin as a binary-compatible, improved model of the Intel 8080 with a better clock velocity, a built-in DRAM refresh controller, and an prolonged instruction set. It was extensively used in desktop computer systems of the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties, arcade online game machines, and embedded methods, and it grew to become a cornerstone of a number of gaming consoles, just like the Sega Grasp System.
In the course of the mid-late Nineteen Seventies, the Z80 grew to become a well-liked CPU for S-100 bus machines, which had been early private computer systems with a 100-pin modular bus system that allowed swapping playing cards to construct methods based mostly on elements from numerous producers. Digital Analysis focused the Z80 as a key platform for its CP/M working system, and the affiliation between Z80 and CP/M caught, powering dozens of small enterprise computer systems till the mid-Eighties, when IBM PC clones working Microsoft’s MS-DOS grew to become the brand new business customary.
Apparently, Microsoft’s first {hardware} product, the Z80 SoftCard for the Apple II in 1980, added the well-known Zilog CPU to the basic private laptop and allowed customers to run CP/M on that machine. In 1982, Invoice Gates claimed that SoftCard installations represented the biggest single person base of CP/M machines.
Final name in June 2024
Zilog is notably discontinuing a number of Z84C00 chips which can be nonetheless out there in basic 40-pin DIP packages resembling the basic Z80 CPU chips of the Nineteen Seventies. (These standalone chips embody a CPU and nothing else, in contrast to a microcontroller, which may embody RAM and different accent units.) The DIP design options two rows of 20 pins with a plastic bundle in between that accommodates the precise embedded silicon chip, resembling the basic Z80 CPU chips of the Nineteen Seventies.
After June 14, Zilog will cease taking orders, manufacture no matter orders can be found if they’re enough in amount, then ship the final runs of the chips to resellers like Mouser Electronics and Digikey.
The discontinuation listing supplied by Zilog in its letter contains 13 merchandise from the Z84C00 collection, that are chips within the Z80 household that run at clock speeds from 6 to twenty MHz and preserve compatibility with the unique Z80 structure. This is the complete listing of half numbers that will likely be discontinued:
- Z84C0006VEG
- Z84C0006PEG
- Z84C0010PEG
- Z84C0008AEG
- Z84C0020VEG
- Z84C0008PEG
- Z84C0010AEG
- Z84C0008VEG
- Z84C0010VEG
- Z84C0010VEG00TR
- Z84C0020AEG
- Z84C0020PEG
- Z84C0006AEG
So whereas the Z80 structure will stick round in eZ80 kind, it seems that that is the final name for newly manufactured standalone 8-bit Z80 CPU chips within the basic DIP kind issue. We reached out to Zilog for clarification about its plans for the way forward for the Z80 platform however didn’t obtain a response by press time.