Now that Zilog Inc is a free-standing quoted company, it is thoroughly revitalised – and profitable at last, but as the onlie begetter of the Z80 chip, still in enormous demand for embedded applications – in telephones and such – it is having to suffer the indignity of going to Japan for a 16-bit version of the part because its own Z280 does not offer much more power than the Z80. According to Microprocessor Report it has therefore licensed the design of the R800 16-bit Z80 developed by Ascii Corp for use in home computers built to the Japanese MSX standard. The R800 includes dynamic random access memory interface, two direct memory access channels, an an on-chip clock generator – and it can be clocked as fast as 28MHz.
