Zilog Z80

The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Zilog from 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for defense purposes, and is one of the most popular CPUs of all time.

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Although Zilog made several attempts to move off the Z80 onto more powerful 16-bit (Zilog Z800, Zilog Z8000, Zilog Z180, Zilog Z280) and 32-bit (Zilog Z80000, Zilog Z380) platforms, other companies were offering CPUs in this performance range years earlier, and the Zilog chips never caught on. Zilog?s most recent CPU is the Zilog eZ80, a faster Z80 with a 16 MB addressing range.

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8-bit: 8-bit CPUs normally use an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus which means that their address space is limited to 64 kilobytes; this is not a "natural law", however, and thus there are exceptions....

Microprocessor: A microprocessor (abbreviated as ?P or uP) is a computer electronic component made from miniaturized transistors on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) (aka microchip or just chip). The central processing unit (CPU) is the most well known microprocessor, but many other components in a com...

Zilog: ZiLOG, often seen as Zilog, is a manufacturer of 8-bit CPUs, and is most famous for its Intel 8080-compatible Z80 series. Zilog was incorporated in California in 1974 by Federico Faggin, who left Intel after working on the 8080, and the Z80 was a vast improvement over it (it was faster, etc.)....