For those wondering, the 6502 and various derivatives are still being manufactured, by one of its original creators [0] - so I'd guess an equivalent development in the world of the Z80's nemesis is unlikely anytime soon.
65*C*02, which might fail if your 6502 code depends on illegal opcodes or incidental memory access or BCD math cycle timing or BCD math flags or perhaps decimal mode being set in an interrupt routine.
It could happen at any time to the 65C02. The Z80 was only EOLed a few weeks ago because they couldn’t get wafers from their fab any more. Any chip on an old process is at risk of this.
It would be interesting to know Zilog's sale volumes for discrete Z80s (say, over the past decade). What uses they were purchased for, and DIP/PLCC/flatpack ratios.
There must be millions floating out there. But with distributors like Mouser or Farnell gone, for anyone looking to buy some, it's eBay & co which tends to be a crapshoot.
> It would be interesting to know Zilog's sale volumes for discrete Z80s (say, over the past decade).
Not the past decade, but two decades ago (2005) the z80 was still popular. At work, I was working on a product based on, IIRC, a Rabbit Semiconductor product, which was a module with on-chip ethernet. It was a Z80 running at 40Mhz.
Personally, I also had a little siemens organiser thing, that also was z80 based (not sure of the actual specs). I recall trying to write programs for it and failing (may not have been open; no way to reprogram or download new code to it, maybe).
Any Z80 based (not eZ80) TI calculators on the market today have the Z80 core built into an ASIC instead of a discrete chip, meaning that they wouldn’t be impacted by parts availability.
[0] https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/chips.php