Intel 8080

What Does Intel 8080 Mean?

Succeeding the Intel 8008 microprocessor, the Intel 8080 was designed by Masatoshi Shima and Federico Faggin. The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Intel and was released in 1974. The microprocessor was considered an enhanced as well as extended version of the preceding 8008 microprocessor. The Intel 8080 microprocessor was one of the most popular microprocessors ever produced.

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Techopedia Explains Intel 8080

The initial design of the 8080 had the drawback of driving only low-power TTL devices. Upon discovery of this, Intel released an updated version of the Intel 8080, known as the Intel 8080A, which was capable of driving standard TTL devices. Similar to the Intel 8008, the 8080 microprocessor also made use of the same interrupt processing logic. The Intel 8080 increased maximum memory size and added more instructions and addressing modes compared to the 8008 microprocessor. The 8080 microprocessor also added the stack pointer register, which was used to point to the position of the external stack in the CPU memory. The 8080 microprocessor is comprised of 40 pins and transfers data through an 8-bit bidirectional data bus.

The Intel 8080 microprocessor was manufactured on a single large-scale integration chip with Intel’s N-channel silicon gate MOS process.

Prior to the 8080 microprocessor, microprocessors were used mainly in computers, cash registers, calculators and similar applications. With the advent of the 8080 microprocessor, more and more applications began to use microprocessors, such as in general-purpose digital computer systems.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…