 The great search brought to you by Digikey and Angel Fruitik. They do use their power of engineer to help you find something on digikey.com using her vast years of experience, creating electronics, looking for parts, and this one is kind of internet famous at the moment, disease. I know. We saw this coming around in Alaska. This is a good one for the great search because frankly, I didn't even know you could still buy the 80 chips, but so a couple days ago, April 15th, you know, you find your taxes and you find out that the Z84C00 product line is end of life. Yeah, they're still products that are probably white goods, automotive industry that uses a Z80 processor. So they're basically is an end of life for the Z80, you know, probably because like the wafer foundry, you know, I can only imagine the wafers must be like 200, 300 nanometer process. It must be incredibly old process and very few chips are using that process and the places that are making these wafers and processing them are probably like, yeah, we're not going to do this anymore. And we actually see this quite a lot. I remember there's been a few chips that I've seen from, I don't know which part it was from analog, that they were like, not only not making this chip, but because there was, if you guys remember like a few years ago, there was I think some fires in Taiwan, I think was it like in Taiwan, there was a there was a fire in the Taiwan or in the Philippines and a big foundry was damaged, like a big chip packaging foundry factory was damaged. And they were like, well, if we're going to rebuild this factory, we're not going to go, we're not going to rebuild all the old processes. And so I think XP was also affected a couple, a couple of companies are affected and a couple chips were like, hey, all of a sudden like we that factory we used to make them is no longer going to be, they're not going to rebuild that old machinery. So it's end of line. And also like I can't imagine that Zilog is selling that many Z80 processors. So this was the Z84. What was cool about it? It came in a dip format, which is just like so cool and so classic. It is last time by, however, there are a bunch available. The last time by date is sorry, I forgot to say mention to go to the computer. But yeah, this is the Z84C008, eight megahertz processor available in dip. They do have a couple thousand available last time by. The last time by is when you basically if you are using this in a product and you really need your like, look, I need three years to transition to our design. Or if you're like, look, I want 10 years worth of product because I want to finish the end of the product line and I'm guaranteeing 10 years. You can usually put in a request and say, hey, I want the last 10, 20,000, whatever quantity. And then what did you will do is they tell Zilog and Zilog will bundle up all these last time buys and do like the final run. I will say that during the chip shortage, there were many times in which I put in requests for last time buys and they did not pan out. So not saying that's going to happen this time. The last time by is not guaranteed. It's a request. There is no guarantee that you'll actually get those chips. But again, part shortages were a welfare time. That said, you know, if we go to embedded. First off, there are Z80 emulators. You can get emulators like, you know, implementations for FPGA. So you can, you can always mimic it if you need to, although to be honest at this point, if you can move your chip to something else, please do. But under microcontrollers, first off, you can look under the series. And you can see there's Z8, which is probably related to the core processor. Let's see if that's where Z80 might be mentioned. There's the EZ80. Actually, I didn't see this before. I wonder what that is. Looks like there's a couple other chips. So the EZ80 is probably, well, a claim. It's a similar family, not available in dip, but it is available. And some of these are discontinued, not for new designs. So let's look at ones that are, it looks like these are, these are kind of fast. Let's look at active ones. So it looks like the EZ80, F91, these are all going to be, you know, they're big chips, the LQFP, big and they're, you know, they're only eight bit, but they are available and looks like they have, you know, they come with peripherals at this point, not USB, but they do have iSquared C and RDA that do not have a lot of space. So, you know, only like 256, you know, ish K and 8K of RAM. So these are not big chips. These are also not five volt friendly. So if you're looking for a five volt friendly, that's not it. But let's look for others, the 80 chips. One thing they'll say is sometimes these microcontrollers are kind of split apart. Sometimes they're under microprocessors. So if you look here for the Z80, this is where you'll see like that Z84 series, which is last time by, but they also do have some active. So again, if you select active and you'll see these are available in five volts. So there's a couple of options. This one is six megahertz, this one is 10. Wow, super fast. Both are five volt friendly. They're available in 100 QFP. Let's just take a quick look at this one. But that is one thing I'll say is, you know, not every chip got discontinued. So this one is still available if you absolutely need a Z80 core. And yeah, it looks like Z80 multiple ports. It's a scanned PDF of a hand drawn data sheet, just like super cool. And I assume that this must implement, yeah, this implements like the Z80 architecture. It's just it's not going to be a surface mount part. However, you could solder this to a board that then has like 40 pins brought out and like adapted into like the pinout you would expect for a Z80 if you need to upgrade an existing Z84C chipset. So it's possible, but it's going to be more complicated than just like having the nice drop in replacement. That said, you can still get a Z80 processor if you want, especially the Z84. So you get that last time by. But, you know, you you could theoretically use this chip. And like I said, just make an adapter chip adapter plate that would plug in. And as long as you have all the peripherals that you are expecting and an amount of RAM and flash, you could program it as is. Something actually we did for the Zoxbox. We used a 64 K flash chip that was dip. I'm trying to use the at mega 64. And then eventually the at mega it wasn't enough space. People wanted the at mega 128. I remember somebody made an adapter that took the TQFP at mega 128 and brought out the pins into the 40 pin, like that, you know, two by 20 pin point six inch wide package. And people would plug them to the Zoxbox into the socket. So such things are possible, but you can still get active Z80s on Digikey. So do that last time by or you can pick up one of these. My pick for the great search.