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Zilog To File For Chapter 11
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."
ZiLOG intends to launch an exchange offer in which all holders of its notes will be offered the opportunity to exchange their notes for shares of ZiLOG common stock, plus a pro rata share of the $30 million non-recourse note. The exchange offer, which for tax and other legal reasons the company intends to complete through a prepackaged Chapter 11 filing, is not expected to have any adverse affect on its day-to-day operations or on its ability to provide a full range of products and services to its customers or pay its suppliers on normal terms.
I dont think we have much to worry about here.
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Pop quiz, hot shot. Tell me what this Z80 code does...
LD BC,0FFFFH
LOOP: DEC BC
JP NZ,LOOP
Go ahead, tell me I am trolling, but how on earth did a company with an ancient, 8-bit architecture manage to get idiots to throw $280M at it?
By creating an architecture that is still used today in everything from calculators to embedded industrial control applications. Not every application needs ghz class CPUs, 512MB of RAM, and pipelined parallel processing.
It's guys like you that keep guys like me employed. Every problem presented to you is solved with a PC in some form factor or another. Computerized home thermostat? Mini PC on a board. Web server for monitoring temperature and pressure? PC in a rack mount case with an A/D board. Telephone voice mail system? PC in a funny looking case. Then when your product is hopelessly over the price target and behind schedule, guys like me get calls, choose an appropriate architecture, be it a PIC, Z80, AVR, or something else, and get the project back in line with reality.
Go ahead and mod this down as flamebait or troll if you want. I've got 50 Karma points as I post this so I'll live with 47 if need be.
Chapter 11 - Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code is frequently referred to as "reorganization." Although an individual may file under Chapter 11, generally it is used to reorganize a business. Individuals with large federal or state tax obligations may use Chapter 11 because an extended period of time may be obtained for the repayment of the taxes. Chapter 11 generally allows the debtor to continue its business operations as it proceeds to the desired goal of a confirmed Plan of Reorganization, which must meet certain statutory criteria. A major rationale for business reorganizations is that the value of a business as an ongoing concern is greater than it would be if its assets were liquidated and sold. Generally, it is more economically efficient in the long run to reorganize than to liquidate, because doing so preserves jobs and assets. Cooperation among the various interests, however, is crucial to a successful reorganization.
Chapter 7 is liquidation where basically everything is gone. Chapter 11 doesn't necessarily mean death for a company. Hell, look at Chrysler.
Man, lots of fond reminiscing here about the Z80 (and clones). Quite rightly, too... the Z80 was a fun little beast.
... rr14). The Z8001 and Z8003 were "segmented", but they used a reasonable segmentation model to achieve 8M memory...
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,
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.
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