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End of the Z80?

That’s a bit annoying.

Maybe one of those gray market foundries in China that churn out clones of some other seriously obsolete chips will start spitting out copies if there’s enough demand for them. I dunno how much demand there really is, though; the price of new build Z80’s have been pretty out-of-whack high for years so it’s pretty certain it hasn’t attracted many new design wins outside the hobby sphere.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
That’s a bit annoying.

Maybe one of those gray market foundries in China that churn out clones of some other seriously obsolete chips will start spitting out copies if there’s enough demand for them. I dunno how much demand there really is, though; the price of new build Z80’s have been pretty out-of-whack high for years so it’s pretty certain it hasn’t attracted many new design wins outside the hobby sphere.
Click to expand...
I'm hearing murmurings from the arcade crowd that a few of the larger shops are willing to commit to one last monolithic order in the hopes they can keep stock for another 20 years. If they don't eat the last batch I'm sure people will be starving for more chips for a while.
 
If the reason for the shutdown really is that their foundry won’t handle these orders anymore it certainly doesn’t bode well for the 6502.

As an aside, something Zilog could do to make life slightly easier for people interested in making updated vintage PC recreations with new-build parts would be to introduce a subtype of the eZ80 that has an option to switch out the onboard peripherals so the old 8-bit in/out commands can work on off-chip hardware. (Or maybe implement a virtualization/NMI scheme to intercept/redirect these instructions in something like the 386’s vm8086 mode; something like that would actually be amazing.) The Z180 had onboard peripherals too, but there’s instructions to move them around.
 
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TubeTimeUS has been saying for a while now that whole product lines are being slashed by MBA driven companies like TI.
Eventually Rochester Electronics will become the most profitable US semiconductor manufacturer. They buy mask rights and
old fabs and charge what the market will bear for old semiconductors.
 
Al Kossow said:
TubeTimeUS has been saying for a while now that whole product lines are being slashed by MBA driven companies like TI.
Eventually Rochester Electronics will become the most profitable US semiconductor manufacturer. They buy mask rights and
old fabs and charge what the market will bear for old semiconductors.
Click to expand...
Does this mean stuff like DIP packaged 74xx will be disappearing from Mouser, etc.?
 
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No. This is not the end.
We have the Soviet and post-Soviet industry of semiconductors which has been maintaining a pretty catalog of old parts some of which were discontinued from the west decades ago. For instance their 8080 was being produced until 2021. The 8085 is still produced there too, I'm completely sure the Z80 still has a long run to go.
 
I thought part of retro experience is searching for hard-to-find parts and figure out a way to test and use them. Z80 is truly retro now.
 
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