IIRC, only the classic 40-pin DIP Z80 was discontinued. The eZ80, which is fully compatible, is still in production.
replyI'm sure clones are still being made.
replyIt's still active as a mask for a more complex system on a single die. Even the support chips are available. The Juno project, orbiting Jupiter, had a Z80 compatible core for the radar signal processing.
replyThe cpu possibly, but I had a hard time trying to find the support chips (ctc, sio/pio, etc)...
replyMany applications didn't even use those peripherals so I suppose production ended earlier.
replyThe Z80 could even refresh the RAM by itself. It was not like the 8080 which required two support chips only to function.
Do you have an actual use for them? I might have a few tubes of Z80-CTC & SIO in the basement if I haven't given them all away yet.
replyWe still have the venerable 8051 for anyone who likes old architectures!!
replyThe 6502 and its variants are still ubiquitous as well, powering millions of toys based on Sunplus/GeneralPlus microcontrollers [1] [2] [3] as well as the vast majority of bootleg game consoles that use variants of "Famiclone" hardware (or occasionally general-purpose 6502 MCUs [4]) to this day. It's fascinating how the toy industry went for the 6502 over the 8051 and PIC12 clones more common in other cheap electronics; I suspect it had to do both with the architecture's better performance (important for tasks such as audio decoding) and with the historical availability of experienced 6502 assembly developers as the game industry moved away from 8-bit platforms.
reply[1] https://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity&page=2
[2] https://archive.org/details/furby-source
[3] https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter#_TOC_a6fe...