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The 8085 had a very long life as a controller. Once designed into such products as the DECtape controller and the VT100 video terminal in the late 1970s, it continued to serve for new production throughout the life span of those products (generally many times longer than the new manufacture lifespan of desktop computers)
The 8085 is a conventional von Neumann design based on the Intel 8080. Unlike the 8080 it had no state signals multiplexed onto the data bus, but the 8-bit data bus was instead multiplexed with the lower part of the 16-bit address bus (in order to limit the number of pins to 40). The processor was designed using nMOS circuitry and the later “H” versions were implemented in Intel’s enhanced nMOS process called HMOS, originally developed for fast static RAM products. The 8085 used approximately 6,500 transistors.
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The 8085 incorporated the functionality of the 8224 (clock generator) and the 8228 (system controller), increasing the level of integration. A downside compared to similar contemporary designs (such as the Z80) was the fact that the buses required demultiplexing, however, address latches in the Intel 8155, 8355, and 8755 memory chips allowed a direct interface, so an 8085 along with these chips was almost a complete system.
The 8085 had extensions to support new interrupts: It had three maskable interrupts (RST 7.5, RST 6.5 and RST 5.5), one Non-Maskable interrupt (TRAP), and one externally serviced interrupt (INTR). The RST n.5 interrupts refer to actual pins on the processor-a feature which permitted simple systems to avoid the cost of a separate interrupt controller.
Like the 8080, the 8085 could accommodate slower memories through externally generated wait states (pin 35, READY), and had provisions for Direct Memory Access (DMA) using HOLD and HLDA signals (pins 39 and 38). An improvement over the 8080 was that the 8085 can itself drive a piezoelectric crystal directly connected to it, and a built in clock generator generates the internal high amplitude two-phase clock signals at half the crystal frequency (a 6.14 MHz crystal would yield a 3.07 MHz clock for instance).
Assembler
Typically a modern assembler creates object code by translating assembly instruction mnemonics into opcodes, and by resolving symbolic names for memory locations and other entitie. The use of symbolic references is a key feature of assemblers, saving tedious calculations and manual address updates after program modifications. Most assemblers also include macro facilities for performing textual substitution—e.g., to generate common short sequences of instructions to run inline, instead of in a subroutine.
Assemblers are generally simpler to write than compilers for high-level languages, and have been available since the 1950s. Modern assemblers, especially for RISC based architectures, such as MIPS, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC, as well as x86(-64), optimize instruction scheduling to exploit the CPU pipeline efficiently.
There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed to produce the executable program. One-pass assemblers go through the source code once and assumes that all symbols will be defined before any instruction that references them. Two-pass assemblers (and multi-pass assemblers) create a table with all unresolved symbols in the first pass, then use the 2nd pass to resolve these addresses. The advantage in one-pass assemblers is speed, which is not as important as it once was with advances in computer speed and capabilities. The advantage of the two-pass assembler is that symbols can be defined anywhere in the program source. As a result, the program can be defined in a more logical and meaningful way. This makes two-pass assembler programs easier to read and maintain.
More sophisticated high-level assemblers provide language abstractions such as:
Advanced control structures
High-level procedure/function declarations and invocations
High-level abstract data types, including structures/records, unions, classes, and sets
Sophisticated macro processing
Object-Oriented features such as encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, interfaces
See Language design below for more details.
Note that, in normal professional usage, the term assembler is often used ambiguously: It is frequently used to refer to an assembly language itself, rather than to the assembler utility. Thus: “CP/CMS was written in S/360 assembler” as opposed to “ASM-H was a widely-used S/370 assembler.”
A modern assembler creates object code by translating assembly instruction mnemonics into opcodes, and by resolving symbolic names for memory locations and other entities. The use of symbolic references is a key feature of assemblers, saving tedious calculations and manual address updates after program modifications. Most assemblers also include macro facilities for performing textual substitution—e.g., to generate common short sequences of instructions to run inline, instead of in a subroutine.
Assemblers are generally simpler to write than compilers for high-level languages, and have been available since the 1950s. Modern assemblers, especially for RISC based architectures, such as MIPS, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC, optimize instruction scheduling to exploit the CPU pipeline efficiently.
There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed to produce the executable program. One-pass assemblers go through the source code once and assumes that all symbols will be defined before any instruction that references them. Two-pass assemblers (and multi-pass assemblers) create a table with all unresolved symbols in the first pass, then use the 2nd pass to resolve these addresses. The advantage in one-pass assemblers is speed, which is not as important as it once was with advances in computer speed and capabilities. The advantage of the two-pass assembler is that symbols can be defined anywhere in the program source. As a result, the program can be defined in a more logical and meaningful way. This makes two-pass assembler programs easier to read and maintain.
Assembly Language
A program written in assembly language consists of a series of instructions–mnemonics that correspond to a stream of executable instructions, when translated by an assembler, that can be loaded into memory and executed.
For example, an x86/IA-32 processor can execute the following binary instruction as expressed in machine language (see x86 assembly language):
Binary: 10110000 01100001 (Hexadecimal: B0 61)
The equivalent assembly language representation is easier to remember (example in Intel syntax, more mnemonic):
MOV AL, 61h
This instruction means:
Move the value 61h (or 97 decimal; the h-suffix means hexadecimal; into the processor register named “AL”.
The mnemonic “mov” represents the opcode 1011 which moves the value in the second operand into the register indicated by the first operand. The mnemonic was chosen by the instruction set designer to abbreviate “move”, making it easier for the programmer to remember. A comma-separated list of arguments or parameters follows the opcode; this is a typical assembly language statement.
In practice many programmers drop the word mnemonic and, technically incorrectly, call “mov” an opcode. When they do this they are referring to the underlying binary code which it represents. To put it another way, a mnemonic such as “mov” is not an opcode, but as it symbolizes an opcode, one might refer to “the opcode mov” for example when one intends to refer to the binary opcode it symbolizes rather than to the symbol — the mnemonic — itself. As few modern programmers have need to be mindful of actually what binary patterns are the opcodes for specific instructions, the distinction has in practice become a bit blurred among programmers but not among processor designers.
Transforming assembly into machine language is accomplished by an assembler, and the reverse by a disassembler. Unlike in high-level languages, there is usually a one-to-one correspondence between simple assembly statements and machine language instructions. However, in some cases, an assembler may provide pseudoinstructions which expand into several machine language instructions to provide commonly needed functionality. For example, for a machine that lacks a “branch if greater or equal” instruction, an assembler may provide a pseudoinstruction that expands to the machine’s “set if less than” and “branch if zero (on the result of the set instruction)”. Most full-featured assemblers also provide a rich macro language (discussed below) which is used by vendors and programmers to generate more complex code and data sequences.
Each computer architecture and processor architecture has its own machine language. On this level, each instruction is simple enough to be executed using a relatively small number of electronic circuits. Computers differ by the number and type of operations they support. For example, a new 64-bit machine would have different circuitry from a 32-bit machine. They may also have different sizes and numbers of registers, and different representations of data types in storage. While most general-purpose computers are able to carry out essentially the same functionality, the ways they do so differ; the corresponding assembly languages reflect these differences.
Multiple sets of mnemonics or assembly-language syntax may exist for a single instruction set, typically instantiated in different assembler programs. In these cases, the most popular one is usually that supplied by the manufacturer and used in its documentation
Assembler source code information
The assembly language source code file must consist of a series of lines of text. Each line may consist of up to four fields as follows:
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