Is Zilog still in business?

How could they do that when to save money Billerbeck fired every single chip design engineer 3 years ago?

It's been, what, 4 years since Zilog designed a new mcu? Thier website news archive doesn't even go back that far!

Peter Seldon wibbled on Tuesday 02 March 2010 23:19

What demons of stupidity possessed him to think that was a good idea? Not that I haven't seen exactly the same behaviour in other companies...

Scott Adams will never run out of material.

--
Tim Watts

Managers, politicians and environmentalists: Nature's carbon buffer.

Speaking of Rabbit, this is topical - and a reflection of where Zilog could have been now...

200 MHz 1 MB internal DRAM and 32K battery backable SRAM up to 6 serial ports (4 as SPI) On-board 802.11 a/b/g and 10/100 Ethernet 64 I/O and USB 2.0 full speed (host) 12-bit A/D converter samples up to 1Megasamples/s Ideal for industrial motor control Integrated hardware and software environment Easily add an HMI as well as CANbus protocol support with the on- board FIMs

only minus, is it's 292-ball BGA. No price ?

-jg

Maybe at the time the choices were to chew off your ARM (pun intended) or to die in the trap?

Rick

Or maybe Billerbeck's intention was to tank the stock price and crash the company so he could sell it in an inside deal to IXYS at a pathetically low price while he accepts money under the table?

BTW, Rick - usenet is text-only.

Whhhaaaaat???

Rick

The Zilog Z80 development was largely the work of one person who decided that he could make a better mouse trap for

8080 and did. The key to its early success was the vast amount of software and the promise of better performance. The Z80 lived up to its promise

All the chip companies at the time had short memories on how hard it was to introduce a new product and put a software base in place.

The Z8 probably should have had a bigger presence than it did in embedded systems it was a remarkably powerful instruction set and had hardware designed so that complex peripherals were combinations of silicon and interrupt handlers, There were a lot of Z8's in many of the disk drives produced in the 90's

Commodore was almost a victim of its success. They became the one to beat. Tramiel with all his business skills could do little to change the public expectation that the next new hot toy would come from a new start up. By the mid 80's he faced serious competition from apple and IBM and games were not basic based anymore. He continued to play around in the industry with Atari.

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So many, in fact, that if you wanted to talk to Zilog in the late 80's and 90's you had to be working for a company that was going to buy thousands of parts per month, or they wouldn't talk to you. Since I was either a student or working for small companies at the time, I was less than dirt in their eyes.

They trained me well: now when I reach for processor data sheets, I quite naturally don't reach for Zilog.

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Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com