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Zilog To File For Chapter 11

Posted by Hemos on from the death-of-the-old-timers dept.

Frédéric writes: "The venerable company ZiLOG who was founded in 1974, and who brought us the famous Z80 CPU (used in the Timex/Sinclair ZX80/ZX81, and the Amstrad CPC/PCW computers), is filling for Chapter 11 ... I didn't find the today's news on the web, but found this article at Silicon Strategy and this one at Electronics times, which was written a few days ago to announce it."

11 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Dont forget our favorite ones. by GiMP · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Z80 also powered the sound chip in the Sega Genesis and a modified chip was used in the Gameboy.

    1. Re:Dont forget our favorite ones. by LordNimon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And the CPU in many of the TRS-80 computers.

      --
      And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
      To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
  2. TRS-80 by LumpyCartman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Also the Early Radio Shack Machines. TRS-80 Model 1 through 4. I once had a Model 6000 running XENIX that had both a Motorola 68000 and then a Z80 for I/O functions

  3. Damn by HuangBaoLin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As a owner of a fully decked out TRS-80 Model I, II and Timex Sinclar 1000, I'm sorry to see them go under. I bet a lot industrial and robot controller companys aren't to thrilled ethier as the CPU has been a sort of staple for them for quite sometime.

    I guess the PIC / microcontroller chip market really took over, leaving little room for Zilog...

  4. How about second sources? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Aren't the newest TI calculators based around a Z-80 alike chips?

    What about second sources?

  5. Think you know your Z80 code? by dstone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pop quiz, hot shot. Tell me what this Z80 code does...

    LD BC,0FFFFH
    LOOP: DEC BC
    JP NZ,LOOP

  6. ORG 1800H by er0ck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I rememebr programming a Z80 Microtrainer in college; it had a keypad for hex code, but I managed to smuggle in a friend's copy of the ZAD cross-compiler to the lab. We had these old 286's with serial-to-headphone jacks that connected to the microtrainer. You typed in your assembly code on the 286, ran it through ZAD, and uploaded it to the microtrainer. You could even hear the data being transfered via the speaker on the microtrainer.

    I remember having my first real experience with handling Interrupt Requests in a lab with the Z80. Too bad the company is having trouble.

    I tried to find a pic of the old microtrainer (made by CAMI Research), but alas, they no longer support it.

    I did manage to find a link to another University that used them for ECE projects. (Thanks Google!)

    http://comet.ctr.columbia.edu/msl/2000class/elevat or/

  7. Zilog literature police contributed to problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    In the last several years it became harder and harder to get literature from Zilog. When new management took over a couple of years ago, most of the legacy PDFs disappeared from the website. Trying to order literature directly was a nightmare.

    Zilog not only made processors but also a rich array of peripheral chips including SCSI chips used in earlier Sun and Macintosh workstations. Unfortunately, Zilog got too big for its britches and forgot who brung them to the dance: small independent software developers. In recent years, unless they thought you were going to place an order for one million chips, their attitude became "go away, son, you bother me."

    Can't say that I'll cry any tears for Zilog.

  8. The joys of Z80 ASM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, I am not as old as some of you guys, but I remember the very day I got my TI-85. The first thing I learned (in about a week) was TI's Basic language. I quickly became bored with that because it did not offer the programmer a whole lot of options. I then discovered that the TI-85 could be programed in ASM... at that point I did not know ASM at all (well besides an inline ASM line I used in Turbo Pascal to turn off the damned blinking cursor) so I bough a book on Z80 ASM.

    After a couple of months I came out with my first ASM game, yea it wasn't all that great but it paved the road for the following games. In those next three years I released 8-9 pretty darn good games for the 85, after that I got a shiney new TI-86 and never touched the 85 again (but again it had a Z80, and a TON more ram to work with). I programed a few games for the 86, but I had slowed down a lot from when I had first started.... I guess I began to get a little bored.

    I had a lot of fun with the Z80 cpu, its ASM language was pretty easy to get the hang of, and it wasn't a slouch.... my games ran fast. I no longer am a part of the TI community, I have moved onto bigger and better things (let me tell ya, knowing ASM in college was awesome.... my asm classes and computer architecture were much easier :) )

    I know there optimizing compilers exist... and they are darn good at what they do, but still there is nothing like optimizing key functions in your code by hand.... Thanks Zilog, you have given me a life skill.

  9. What about the other stuff? by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Man, lots of fond reminiscing here about the Z80 (and clones). Quite rightly, too... the Z80 was a fun little beast.

    Zilog, however, made lots of other stuff. Some were moderately successful (Z8530 SCC), some not so (Z8000 MPU).

    The Z8000 actually was fairly popular in military applications until COTS took over. I seem to recall many avionics systems used it. When it came out, it was comparable to the 68K.

    It had 16 16bit registers (r0-r15), each of which could be addressed as 2 8-bit registers (rhN, rlN). R15 was the stack pointer. Nice orthagonal instruction set, with logical block moves (similar to the Z80 LDIR instruction), as compared to the intel REP instructions...

    The registers could be doubled up into 32-bit registers (rr0, rr2, ... rr14). The Z8001 and Z8003 were "segmented", but they used a reasonable segmentation model to achieve 8M memory...

    The low 16 bits were the offset in the segment, and the high 7 bits were the segment number. So, you essentially had 23 bit addressing. Of course, the way you generated segmented addresses was a tad odd... I believe bits 30:24 were the segement number in a 32-bit address.

    Only problem was, they never got the Z8070 FPU working. Bummer.

    --
    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
  10. Sad by John+Jorsett · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm one of those veterans who built his own computer at the dawn of the Personal Computer era. The 4 MHz Z80 was the ne plus ultra of the processor world, and we thought we were hot stuff when we managed to overclock one above 5 MHz. Their Serial I/O chips were also the most advanced thing going for serial comms, and we implemented many protocols like X.25 and PARS that formerly required a complete circuit board for what the SIO did. It's a bit sad to see what was once the cutting edge company brought so low.