Wikipedia
UTF-EBCDIC is a character encoding used to represent Unicode characters. It is meant to be EBCDIC-friendly, so that legacy EBCDIC applications on mainframes may process the characters without much difficulty. Its advantages for existing EBCDIC-based systems are similar to UTF-8's advantages for existing ASCII-based systems. Details on UTF-EBCDIC are defined in Unicode Technical Report #16.
To produce the UTF-EBCDIC encoded version of a series of Unicode code points, an encoding based on UTF-8 (known in the specification as UTF-8-Mod) is applied first. The main difference between this encoding and UTF-8 is that it allows Unicode code points U+0080 through U+009F (the C1 control codes) to be represented as a single byte and therefore later mapped to corresponding EBCDIC control codes. In order to achieve this, UTF-8-Mod uses 101XXXXX instead of 10XXXXXX as the format for trailing bytes in a multi-byte sequence. As this can only hold 5 bits rather than 6, the UTF-8-Mod encoding of codepoints above U+009F is generally larger than the UTF-8 encoding.
The UTF-8-Mod transformation leaves the data in an ASCII-based format (for example, U+0041 "A" is still encoded as 01000001), so each byte is fed through a reversible (one-to-one) lookup table to produce the final UTF-EBCDIC encoding. For example, 01000001 in this table maps to 11000001; thus the UTF-EBCDIC encoding of U+0041 (Unicode's "A") is 0xC1 (EBCDIC's "A").
This encoding form is rarely used, even on the EBCDIC-based mainframes for which it was designed. IBM EBCDIC-based mainframe operating systems, such as z/OS, usually use UTF-16 for complete Unicode support. For example, DB2 UDB, COBOL, PL/I, Java and the IBM XML toolkit support UTF-16 on IBM mainframes.