Zilog Z280 : Further reading Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zilog Z280

16-bit microprocessor by Zilog

The Zilog Z280 is an 16-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog as an enhancement of the Zilog Z80 architecture and integrating improvements from the abandoned Zilog Z800 project. First introduced in July 1987, the Z280 is considered to be a commercial failure.

The Z280 was fabricated in CMOS,^[1] added a memory management unit (MMU) to expand the addressing range to 16 MB, features for multitasking and multiprocessor and coprocessor configurations, and 256 bytes of on-chip static RAM, configurable as either a cache for instructions and/or data, or as part of the ordinary address space. It has a huge number of new instructions and addressing modes giving a total of over 2000 combinations. It is capable of efficiently handling 32-bit data operations including hardware multiply, divide, and sign extension. It offers Supervisor and User operating modes, and optionally separate address spaces for instructions and data in both modes (four total possible address spaces). Its internal clock signal can be configured to run at 1, 2 or 4 times the external clock's speed (e.g. a 12MHz CPU with a 3 MHz bus). Unlike the Z80 the Z280 uses a multiplexed arrangement for its address and data busses. More successful extensions of the Z80-architecture include the Hitachi HD64180 in 1986 and Zilog eZ80 in 2001, among others. See further Zilog Z800.

The Z280 had many advanced features for its time, most of them never seen again on a Zilog processor:^[2]

On-chip instruction and/or data cache, or on-chip RAM
Instruction pipelining
High performance 16-bit Z-BUS interface or 8-bit Z80-compatible bus interface
Built-in MMU with memory protection
Ability to determine which register set is in context with instructions JAF and JAR
Three on-chip 16-bit counter/timers
Four on-chip DMA channels
On-chip full duplex UART
User I/O trap
Supervisor mode (privileged instructions)
Illegal instruction trap^{[citation needed]}
Coprocessor emulation trap
Burst mode memory access
Multiprocessor support, with many bus configuration modes
Support for multiple external coprocessors through an accelerated communication interface
Multiple I/O pages, which also allows for internal I/O devices without restricting the address range of the I/O ports like on eZ80, or conflicting with existing motherboard devices, like the Z180.
Stack overflow warning

References

^ EDN November 27, 1986 p133
^ Z280 MPU Microprocessor Unit Preliminary Technical Manual (PDF). San Jose, California: Zilog. 1989. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-09-11. Retrieved 2009-07-15.