pbasm is an assembler for the Picoblaze soft microcontroller, also known as the KCPSM (Constant (k) Coded Programmable State Machine). The open source pbasm assembler is written in C and uses the Flex and Bison tools to generate the scanner/parser. pbasm supports multiple Picoblaze variants and is best suited for Unix or Linux users (although it should also work fine on MS Windows in conjunction with the Cygwin environment).

The pbasm assembler was mainly written just for the fun of it, but it may also prove useful as it is portable, open source and easy to use.

The Picoblaze processor is provided as a VHDL macro that is synthesized for Xilinx FPGA's or CPLD's. Programs written for the Picoblaze can be assembled into a VHDL block RAM definition that can be linked with the processor, and both processor and program can be completely embedded within the programmable device. A good introduction is the Xilinx application note 213: 8-bit Microcontroller for Virtex Devices.

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