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by fake-name 353 days ago
These are intended to implement things like specialized communication protocols, or other IO behaviour. Basically, it lets you push a variety of things you'd normally do via CPU polling to the hardware.

You could easily do SPI (or something similar, like BiSS-C) in 32 LUTs.

The Raspberry Pi Pico modules have something similar (their PIO modules, which support up to 32 instructions - https://dev.to/blues/a-practical-look-at-pio-on-the-raspberr...).

TI also have a CLB module that's actually even smaller (though they document theirs) - https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/spruir8b/spruir8b.pdf

Basically, this is a pretty broadly available IO abstraction.