TI Floating-point Piccolo MCUs Provide Optimized Performance for Power Line Communications
Bridging the gap between low-cost Piccolo and high-performance Delfino™ floating-point microcontrollers (MCUs), Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announced its new low-cost TMS320F2806x Piccolo floating-point MCUs. The new Piccolo MCUs offer an enhanced math engine specifically designed to simplify programming and optimize performance in real-time control applications that may require integrated communications.
Developers of energy-efficient motor control and renewable energy applications can now use a single F2806x MCU to cost-effectively execute control loops as well as power line communications (PLC) protocols and modulation schemes. Balancing performance with the integration and ease-of-use inherent to MCUs, the new F2806x MCUs also deliver a broader range of connectivity and memory options and are backed by TI’s robust tools and free controlSUITE™ software.
Key features and benefits of F2806x Piccolo floating-point MCUs include: cutting-edge math engine comprised of 80 MHz floating-point C28x™ core, new Viterbi Complex Math Unit (VCU) and Control Law Accelerator (CLA) options; floating-point core greatly eases programming, improves compatibility with meta-language tools, and improves performance by up to 40% over fixed point; new VCU complex math unit provides 75 tailored math instructions to accelerate processing of communications algorithms, such as those for PLC, by a factor of up to 7X; increased communications and throughput via USB 2.0 full-speed (host and device), CAN and direct memory access (DMA); 15+ MCUs provide an increased memory range of 52 – 100KB RAM, 128 – 256 KB flash as well as options for 80 and 100 pin packages; control-oriented peripherals, including industry’s highest resolution PWMs (150ps), 3 MSPS 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and 3 analog comparators with 10-bit reference; low-cost F2806x controlSTICK and modular controlCARD enable easy evaluation with TI’s compatible experimenter and real-world hardware application development tools; and IQmath Library for code compatibility and scaling throughout the C2000 platform, including the low-cost Piccolo series and high-performance Delfino floating-point series.
The new Piccolo F2806x floating-point MCUs start at $4.95 (1K volumes) and samples are immediately available.
