ZiLOG discontinues the Z80 & Support IC's in June 2024

[Kai Robinson]

The legendary Zilog Z80 CPU is being discontinued after nearly 50 years

The iconic IC device, developed by Federico Faggin, will soon be phased out, and interested parties only have a few months left to place their orders before...

www.techspot.com

While nothing Apple made uses the Z80 specifically, the Z85C3008VEG PLCC44 and Z85C3008PEG PDIP-40 (aka the 85C30 SCC) used in a lot of 68K Macs, is also being discontinued.

If you're repairing a damaged board or building a Reloaded board of any description and you're wanting a verifiable NEW part from ZiLOG - this is your LAST chance to get one before ZiLOG cease manufacturing them!

After this you'll be at the mercy of remarked chips from china and dubious quality parts from eBay and board pulls.

I'd recommend stocking up on the 53C80's in both forms - you might also be lucky enough to find Z53C8003PSG PDIP-48 (aka the 53C80 SCSI controller) parts as well - you can still get QFP versions of these but they'd need to be adapted to PDIP/PLCC footprints.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

There's been talk that Rochester may take up the masks, but they haven't said anything.

 

[Melkhior]

Darn. Loads of stuff getting discontinued lately...

Hopefully Rochester will pick up the masks, but those chips are going to get even more expensive than they were already (north of 8€ for a Z85C30!?).

Skywater 130nm can do 5V. I wonder how complex it would be to recreate some of those discontinued chips in it (Zilog and others). And how expensive to do a MPW run of them.

 

[Kai Robinson]

€8 for a chip doesnt sound too bad - wait til someone like rochester gets hold of it - it'll be something like $75 each in MoQ of 20.

 

[Melkhior]

€8 for a chip doesnt sound too bad

It all depends what you compare it with.
I suppose in absolute terms it's not terrible, hobbyist won't be bankrupted by a 8€ chip.
In relative terms, it's shockingly expensive. You can get MCUs from ST and the likes with a 500+ MHz Cortex A7 and a bunch of peripherals for less money (e.g. the STM32H7 range). Buy two 85C30 for your Mac, and you can almost afford an entry-level Spartan 7 instead (17.7€ at Mouser FR), which could probably emulate most if not all of a Mac I/Os on its own.

5V logic (and 5V-tolerant) seems to be fully dying off at major manufacturers, I guess it's no longer worth the hassle for them to keep using dying fabs and 5V products can't be migrated to newer processes, or at least not in a way that make economic sense. AMD/Xilinx, Texas, Zilog, seems we get LODs every other month :-(

 

[KennyPowers]

Is the Z85C3008VEG compatible with UG12 on the SE/30?