As a result of its CMOS technology and low clock speeds, 8 MHz for the Harris HM-6100A, it had relatively low power consumption, less than 100 mW at 10 V/2 MHz, and could be operated from a single supply over the wide range of 4–11 V. Thus, it could be used in high reliability embedded systems without the need for any significant thermal management, if the rest of the system was also CMOS.
The 6100 family was used in a number of commercial products, including the DECmate line, DEC's first attempt to produce a personal computer.
It has three primary registers: PC (program counter), 12-bit AC (accumulator), and MQ (Multiplier Quotient).
This makes it difficult to have subroutines in ROM, these must find some other location to store the address.
When the interrupt is tripped, the CPU stores the current PC in 0000, and then starts executing from 0001.
Intersil offered a variety of related chips[4] to support 6100 systems: Intersil also offered compatible sizes of RAM and ROM: A selection of these components were offered as parts of the Intersil 6801 CMOS Family Sampler Kit, and with the 6960 Sampler PC Board, a single-board system including the IM6100 CPU, IM6101 PIE, the IM6312 ODT (Octal Debugging Technique) Monitor ROM, three 256×4 CMOS RAMs and a IM6403 UART.