Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Zilog Z380

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The Z380 is a Zilog 16-bit/32-bit processor from 1994. It is Z80 compatible, but it was released much later than its competitors (the Intel 386 and Motorola 68020) and as a result was never able to gain any significant market leverage. On the other hand, the newer and faster eZ80 family has been more successful recently (as of 2005).

The chip supports 16-bit processing with a clock speed of up to 20 MHz.

The Z380 is incompatible with Zilog's previous generation CPU, the Z280. As the Z380 is derived from the Z180, it is a simpler, less efficient design than the Z280, with significantly fewer features:

  • No pipelined execution (only fetch/execute overlap)
  • No memory protection
  • Much simpler MMU
  • Minimum of 4 clocks/instruction, against 1 (cache hit) or 2 (cache miss) on the Z280.
  • No on-chip cache
  • Lacks the I/O trap feature

    • References

    Zilog Z380 Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA