The Z80 spawned the 64180 which was a Z80 with loads of stuff built in (from Wikipedia)

Execution and bus access clock rates up to 10 MHz

Memory Management Unit supporting 512K bytes of memory (one megabyte for the HD64180 packaged in a PLCC)

I/O space of 64K addresses

12 new instructions including 8 bit by 8 bit integer multiply, non-destructive AND and illegal instruction trap vector

Two channel Direct Memory Access Controller (DMAC)

Programmable wait state generator

Programmable DRAM refresh

Two channel Asynchronous Serial Communication Interface (ASCI)

Two channel 16-bit Programmable Reload Timer (PRT)

1-channel Clocked Serial I/O Port (CSI/O)

Programmable Vectored Interrupt Controller

As a consequence it was really popular in the 90s as an embedded processor just when I was starting my career. This lead to me writing thousands of lines of Z80 assembly. You could program it in C but the compiler was useless at making stuff go fast.

One of those things I wrote was an LZ77 decompressor used in a satellite broadcast system. It took me about a week to write it, test it and optimise it. Quite a challenge! I remember optimising it about the LDIR instruction to copy memory.

The compressor was written in C and ran on the PCs of the day.