The Computer History Museum's oral history of the Z-80 has some interesting stories about the layout (but doesn't mention any nervous breakdown). The Z-80 proje

The Computer History Museum's oral history of the Z-80 has some interesting stories about the layout (but doesn't mention any nervous breakdown). The Z-80 project hired some layout draftsmen, but they were slow and the chip was running behind schedule. So CEO Federico Faggin starts helping with the layout and ends up doing 3/4 of the chip layout himself after 3 1/2 months of 80-hour weeks. "You know, a CEO doing layout draftsman job was not something that would be normal, but that’s what I had to do, and I did it." By comparison, the simpler 8080 took six months of layout. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Zilog_Z80/102658073.05.01.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...