PicoBlaze is an 8-bit microcontroller soft core developed and maintained by Xilinx engineer Ken Chapman. It can be embedded in various CPLDs and FPGAs, including Cool Runner II, Virtex-E, Virtex-II (Pro), and Spartan-3 (E). The name "PicoBlaze" is a playful nod to the more powerful MicroBlaze, which is Xilinx’s main 32-bit RISC soft core. In some cases, it's even referred to as uBlaze to emphasize its compact size.
Interestingly, the term "pico" comes from the metric prefix meaning one trillionth (10^-12), similar to how "pF" stands for picofarad in electronics. PicoBlaze lives up to its name—when implemented on an XC3S500E FPGA, it only consumes 96 SLICEs, which is just 5% of the available logic resources. Despite its small size, it delivers strong performance, executing each instruction in two clock cycles. For example, with a 50MHz clock on a Spartan-3E Starter Kit board, PicoBlaze can achieve up to 25MIPS, making it ideal for applications that don’t require high computational power.
PicoBlaze is not just a simple controller—it's a programmable state machine, known as KCPSM (Konstant Code Programmable State Machine), according to Ken Chapman’s design. This makes it highly flexible for tasks like LED control, motor control, PWM generation, UART communication, and even audio processing. It can also act as a peripheral for larger processors like MicroBlaze or PPC, or serve as an interrupt controller.
In real-world applications, PicoBlaze has proven its versatility. One notable example is the massive LED display at the JP Morgan Chase building in Times Square, New York. This screen, once the world’s largest high-resolution LED display, was powered by over 1,000 instances of PicoBlaze. As a design supervisor noted: “The favorite tool in our Xilinx bag-of-tricks is the PicoBlaze processor. Without it, we couldn’t have completed the project on time. It offers a quick and easy way to develop control functions, eliminating the need to build custom state machines for every task.â€
From simple LED flashers to complex system monitoring, PicoBlaze is a powerful yet compact solution. Don’t overlook it just because of the popularity of 32-bit processors. Sometimes, the little guy does the job best.
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