|
 |
dspZONE Products for the week of September 8, 2008
Texas Instruments Says…
“Piccolo” 32-bit MCUs Bring Real-Time Control for Greater Energy Efficiency to Cost-Sensitive Applications.
TMS320F280xx MCUs feature control law accelerator for 5x performance boost and leading peripherals for greater system integration
Helping bring processor intensive, real-time control to cost-sensitive applications and broadening its overall MCU portfolio, Texas Instruments has announced a new series of 32-bit TMS320F280xx microcontrollers (MCU) starting at less than $2 in volume. F2802x/F2803x microcontrollers feature architectural advancements and enhanced peripherals in package sizes starting at 38-pins to bring the benefits of 32-bit real-time control to applications typically unable to justify the associated cost. Real-time control offers greater system efficiency and precision through the implementation of advanced algorithms for industrial, consumer and automotive applications such as solar power micro-inverters, LED lighting, white goods appliances and hybrid automotive batteries.
“The combination of 32-bit performance, enhanced peripherals and small package sizes allows designers to add real-time control and system management using just one microcontroller to applications that could not afford it previously,” said Keith Ogboenyiya, TMS320C2000 marketing manager, TI. “We named these devices Piccolo because of the small size and price that they offer our customers. They also double the number of C2000 options and build on TI’s growing MCU portfolio.”
Real-time control drives energy efficiency across many applications
Piccolo F2802x/F2803x controllers can replace multiple electronic components to lower overall system cost while enabling advanced power electronics management. For example, in a variable frequency air conditioning unit, a single F2802x/F2803x controller can precisely control two electric three-phase motors as well as perform power factor correction (PFC) calculations. Currently required in approximately 30 percent of the world's markets, including Europe, China, Japan and India, PFC improves the efficiency of the load to make best use of the power from the utility.
For commercial and industrial lighting applications, LED technology can bring up to 50 percent higher energy efficiency when compared to traditional high pressure sodium lamps. F2802x/F2803x-based LED control systems offer intelligent current control and easy system networking to bring down system complexity as well as the cost of managing color mixing and temperature control required for white LED systems.
Piccolo microcontrollers also offer the performance and integration to implement power line communications (PLC) for street light networks that allow cities to pinpoint power outages and centrally manage and adjust lighting based on time of day, traffic or weather conditions. According to a 2008 study prepared by Robert Grow, Director of Government Relations for the Greater Washington Board of Trade, the ten largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. could reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 1.2 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking 212,000 vehicles off the road – and save $90 million a year by switching to more efficient lighting such as LED or intelligent streetlight networks for their roads.
Piccolo microcontrollers also enable higher operating efficiency and control for solar panels. Typical solar systems use one inverter across multiple panels, but initial investigations have shown that individual micro-inverters connected to each solar panel within a system can drive higher power conversation efficiencies. Micro-inverters maximize the output of each individual panel compared to system wide inverters that maximize the average output of the panels as a complete system.
New CLA and leading peripherals drive performance increase and system integration
The Piccolo series of MCUs will feature advancements such as a programmable, floating-point control law accelerator (CLA) designed to offload complex high speed control algorithms from the main TMS320C28x CPU. The CLA, which will be available starting with the F2803x series, frees the CPU to handle I/O and feedback loop metrics, resulting in up to a 5x performance increase for common closed-loop applications.
TI’s patented, enhanced pulse width modulators (ePWM) support the industry's highest resolution with frequency modulation down to 150 pico-seconds to enable more control over harmonics and reduce sample-to-output delay – a critical factor to avoid missing the falling edges of signals. At 4.6 MSPS, Piccolo devices’ on-chip, 12-bit ADC is up to four times faster than the closest competitor, allowing designers to reduce the complexity and cost of the design process, while achieving excellent accuracy and performance.
Two on-chip oscillators operating at 10 MHz each with +/- 1 percent accuracy eliminate the need for external oscillators and their associated cost. Many microcontrollers, in comparison, integrate ring oscillators, which have drift as high as 50 percent, rendering them unsuitable for reliable communication interface clocking. Piccolo oscillators also offer triple redundancy with on-chip self-test features to help designers achieve system-level safety certifications such as the IEC 60730 safety standard required for white goods in Europe. The simple power architecture eliminates the need for external power ICs and uses a single 3.3V supply with internal regulator down to 1.9V while providing brown-out protection and power-on reset.
EN-Genius Says…
The competitive pricing and application-specific configurations displayed by TI’s new series of DSCs are further indicators of how rapidly the embedded signal processing market is maturing. Although its C2000-heritage processor has been tweaked to run slightly slower to meet tight cost and power margins, TI says that its array of integrated accelerator cores and smart peripherals actually give the Piccolo series better performance in many typical automotive and consumer applications. Piccolo’s rich mix of peripherals and increased effective compute power should also make it a natural for many so-called green power applications including, high-efficiency power supplies, PWM motor drives solar inverters, and solid-state lighting controllers.
Piccolo’s 40 - 60 MHz 32-bit CPU is backed up with a 32-bit floating point math accelerator that does most of the heavy lifting for both control law algorithms like PID and standard signal processing algorithms like FIR and IIR filter FFT/IFFT algorithms. TI has also made some significant improvements to its PWM output controllers so they’re more accurate, smarter, and much less demanding of CPU time. Each of the processor 10 - 14 PWM channels has its own logic that can be programmed to stop, start, change duty cycles, or change phase when it receives a trigger signal based on inputs from the local ADC, comparator, interrupts, or other external events. Relieving the main processor from having to baby sit the PWM controller can save lots of CPU cycles, that can be put to better use elsewhere, while also making it much more responsive to interrupts and other real-time events that actually require its attention.
TI efforts to add as much value to their new family seems to be a sign that they are very conscious of the competition from they are encountering from companies like Freescale and STMicro at the high end and from Microchip at the lower end. They’ve used their skills at integration to help slash overall BOM costs by absorbing several key functions that would otherwise be implemented in discrete components. This includes a fast (4.6 Msample/s) multi-channel (7 - 16 channels) 12-bit ADC and an on-chip voltage regulator and voltage supervisor that uses the 3.3 V I/O power input to derive its own core voltage. All Piccolo processors also feature on-chip oscillators (with 1% accuracy) eliminating the need for external clock source. TI added dual clocks with an eye towards the emerging safety standards for appliances that require a separate clock for a watchdog timer.
Since TI has already had good success applying some of their earlier C2000 devices in solar inverters and high-efficiency motor controllers (in fact their TMS320F28x series won a 2006 Product of the Year award) it’s no surprise that one of the key markets for the Piccolo family is in other green power applications. In addition to simplifying the design of motor controllers and digitally-controlled power supplies, TI sees their devices in some less-obvious applications such as controllers for smart, high-powered LED lighting to cut operating costs in commercial and municipal settings. The Piccolo family sub-$2 entry price should also make it a good candidate for use in so-called micro-inverters that TI touts in their press release. I’m not sure whether per-panel dc-ac conversion using micro-inverters will be as energy-efficient or cost-effective as National Semi’s Solar Magic controller technology (see our July 2008 review), but it will be interesting to see how the two technologies evolve and win market share over the next year or two.
Given the extra computational power they pack, its easy to see these DSCs at the heart of the next generation of hybrid/electric drive systems where their intelligence can be put to work running the algorithms for sophisticated regenerative braking, battery management and start/stop operations without adding another processor subsystem. Piccolo is also a natural fit for green appliances where it can support variable frequency drives that provide finely-controlled torque and use less electricity.
The first Piccolo microcontrollers, the F2802x series, will be available for sampling in December 2008 and will include 40 to 60 MHz variations, up to 128 kbyte Flash memory, 12-bit ADC, ePWM and peripherals such as: communications protocols, on-chip oscillators, analog comparators and general purpose I/Os. F2802x devices will push the low-cost envelope with pricing at sub $2 each in volume. Future device introductions in 2009 will offer higher performance and memory sizes, the Control Law Accelerator, and LIN and CAN communications peripherals. Pricing of these products will range from sub-$2 to $7.95. Piccolo microcontrollers are 100% code-compatible with earlier-generation C2000 devices, allowing choices from the entire portfolio.
Building on the controlCARD concept of removable target boards with general and application specific target boards, TI will introduce an F2802x/F2803x-based controlCARD in December for $49. The new controlCARD will be compatible with all C2000 experimenter and application-specific developer kits. This includes the C2000 experimenter kits ($89), digital power experimenter kit ($229), dc-dc developer kit ($325), and the ac-dc developer kit ($695). Each kit includes a 32 k code-limited version of TI’s Code Composer Studio, IDE, Gerber and hardware files and free application software. Hands-on training workshops are also available worldwide.
Product Page
|
|
|
|
|
