The M6800 Microcomputer System, later dubbed the Motorola 6800 family, M6800 family, or 68xx, [1] [2] was a series of 8-bit microprocessors from Motorola that began with the 6800 CPU. The 6800 initially competed against Intel's 8-bit family of chips such as the 8080, but new entries like the MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80 drove the original 6800 from widespread use.
Contents
The original 6800 was typical of microprocessors of the era, requiring the designer to add RAM and ROM and other support chips to build a complete system. Over the 6800's lifetime, improvements in the design allowed a number of these other chips to be built-in to the CPU to turn them into single-chip systems, better known today as microcontrollers. The limitations in available space and cost of production produced a series of similar designs that added or removed various features to allow them to fit in a single package.
Although the 6800 itself did not see as widespread use as some contemporary designs, it had a wide influence on the market as a whole. The desire to simplify the 6800 to reduce its cost led to the 6502, which became one of the most popular designs of the era. The 6800 was also "cloned" by Hitachi as the 6301. Both were re-implemented in CMOS, which had "C" in the name to distinguish them. Motorola upgraded the 6800 into the Motorola 6809, which was backward compatible while also adding a variety of new features. This was also cloned by Hitachi, who added many new features of their own to produce the Hitachi 6309.
Greatly improved versions of the later family members continued to be offered by Motorola into the 1990s, when the chip division was spun out as Freescale Semiconductor, which in turn was purchased by NXP in 2015. NXP continues to offer the design to this day, used as an embedded controller in larger chip systems.
