I’ve seen a VHDL implementation of the Z80 on the net. It is so old, it’s last fixes were from 19 years ago…

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Developed by Unity iOS dev Renaldas Zioma, the Free and Open Source (FOSS) Z80 GitHub project outlines its plans to revive and preserve the Z80 with a physical silicon clone.

The project is ostensibly a reaction to Zilog’s end-of-life announcement for the Z80, which was introduced in 1976 and was used in many of Texas Instruments’ calculators; gaming consoles like the Sega Master System; the ZX Spectrum; and many other devices.

While the first step should be relatively easy as the Z80 has been reverse engineered, producing even physical samples would normally cost a decent amount of money, more than a single developer would ordinarily be prepared to pay for.

To get around this problem, Zioma says he’ll make use of Tiny Tapeout, a multi-project wafer (MPW) service that uses Skywater’s open source 130nm process design kit.

People submit their open source projects to be included in the next production run, and if accepted into a shuttle, will have their individual designs consolidated into one relatively large die.

Unless Zioma has the capital to fund this project to completion, or successful crowdfunding or some other line of financing, it’s hard to see how the FOSS Z80 clone will actually make it to wider production volumes.

The original article contains 852 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!