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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....



Thanks for the nice comment! I haven't looked into the 8080 because other people have examined it in detail. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101956 for an exact Verilog representation of the 8080.




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