Next up in our series of Rochester Electronics’ favorite 1970s semiconductors is the Motorola 6800 processor and its peripherals.

In 1974, the MC6800 processor and peripherals first hit the market for Motorola. That is the same year that Intel also introduced their 8080 processor. The development of this product line started back in 1972, an extraordinary 50 years ago! Looking back, it’s amazing to think about how these processors and peripherals were created, which included 3” or 4” wafers and NMOS technology with 1 layer of metal. The critical dimensions in this era were 6um and the performance roughly 2Mhz.

In 50 years, we now have a remarkable 3 orders of magnitude in density and performance improvement for the same price at roughly $300. That was approximately the price of the MC6800 when it was first launched. Every one of the 4100 transistors was drawn by hand in the schematic, as well as for fabrication. Below is a snippet of the original MC6800 schematic from Motorola that we have at Rochester:

The 72 unique instructions (a portion of instruction decode shown in the schematic) producing 197 opcodes with a 16-bit address bus gave 64KB of direct memory access. Back in the day, that was leading-edge and very similar to what Intel implemented in their 8080 processor. Both Motorola and Intel had to create compilers for their processors and for Motorola, this was brand new at the time. Like today, the number of engineers working on the software for the MC6800 exceeded the hardware. The peripherals around the MC6800 include the MC6810 (128-byte RAM), MC6850 (Communications interface adapter, and the MC6820 (PIA) among others.

We are in the process of bringing back the MC6800 at Rochester. Prototypes will be available in Q1 2023. Most of the peripherals (MC6850, MC6821, MC6840) are already available at Rochester today as are the follow-on processors in this 8-bit family such as the MC6802 and MC6809. We hope you enjoyed this second installment of our series.

Stay tuned for more in the coming months!

Motorola’s 6800 Series Lives On

To learn more about Rochester Manufactured 6800 and 68000 series parts, please visit the following links:

Motorola 6800 Series Portfolio

Motorola 68020 Family Portfolio