At Zilog, Faggin and his team wanted to create an improved version of the 8080 that would be more efficient, flexible, and easier to use. This led to the development of the Z80, which was designed to be both backward-compatible with the 8080 and more powerful. This compatibility meant that any software written for the 8080 could run on the Z80, making it an attractive upgrade for manufacturers and developers.
The Z80 had several key improvements over the 8080. It featured more registers, block instructions, bitwise ops, indexed addressing, and improved interrupt handling. It also had built-in memory refresh for dynamic RAM, that made it easier to build systems around it.
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