Ken Shirriff has an excellent series of blog posts on early Intel chips (running from 4004 to 8086 I think). Don't believe he's done one on the 8080 but the pos

Ken Shirriff has an excellent series of blog posts on early Intel chips (running from 4004 to 8086 I think). Don't believe he's done one on the 8080 but the post on the 8008 is great [1] and I'd expect that the 8080 (which followed it and was designed by the same team) is very similar. In short no microcode but there is a PLA (Programmable Logic Array) which helps to decode the instructions. [1] http://www.righto.com/2016/12/die-photos-and-analysis-of_24.html http://www.righto.com/2016/12/die-photos-and-analysis-of_24....