TI unveils floating point DSC for greener industrial apps

Floating point DSC

Texas Instruments has released a new floating-point digital signal controller (DSC) developed in its India R&D centre at ESC-India. The F28335 controller is the industry's first floating-point DSC, supplying developers of industrial systems with the inherent floating-point advantages of performance and simplified software development over fixed-point devices, the company says.

"This is the first time that we have DSP with floating point in a controlled environment. So engineers can have a relatively complex algorithm being done at a low cost in a typical controlled environment," said Greg Lowe, senior VP at Texas Instruments. "The simplified software development and performance boost common to floating-point processors offer better power efficiency for greener industrial applications," Greg added. The F2833x devices enable variable speed AC drives, which use one-eighth the energy compared to constant speed counterparts. The floating-point devices also enable clean energy through solar power inverters that more efficiently convert energy from photovoltaic panels.

The new F2833x floating-point controllers can increase performance by an average of 50 per cent over TI's previous DSCs while operating at the same 150 MHz clock rate. Some algorithms, such as a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) used for complex calculations, will see a 200 per cent improvement over an equivalent 32-bit fixed-point implementation.

Embedded software engineers typically prefer to design and prototype control systems in floating-point arithmetic, but final designs are usually implemented in fixed-point arithmetic. By removing the need to convert from floating point to fixed point, F2833x devices can save weeks or months of development time and eliminate the required modifications to scaling, saturation and adjustment of numerical resolution.

F28335 eZdsp starter kit

TI has also introduced the F28335 eZdsp starter kit that makes it easy for engineers to evaluate and develop software on its floating-point TMS320F2833x DSCs. The F28335 eZdsp starter kit, produced by Spectrum Digital, a member of the TI DSP Third Party Network, is a stand-alone tool that provides developers a platform to easily develop software for the F2833x controllers. Only Rs.20,021.95 ($495), this low-cost development platform provides all the hardware and software necessary for evaluation and software development, ultimately cutting design cycle time and associated costs.

The F28335 eZdsp comes complete with an F28335 target board, TI's Code Composer Studio Integrated Development Environment (version 3.3), universal AC power adapter and USB cable. The target board features the 150MHz/300 MFLOPS F28335 DSC with 512KB flash and 68KB RAM, 128Kx16 off-chip SRAM.

Developers can now order samples of the TMS320F28835 and the F28335 eZdsp kit from TI or any TI authorised distributor. Samples of the F28335 are available in the 176-pin TQFP package and ready for delivery.

Dipti Agarwal
EE Times India