New Industry Products

TI Releases Newest Piccolo MCUs Featuring Control Law Accelerator

May 03, 2009 by Jeff Shepard

Claiming to be driving development of more reliable, efficient embedded control applications, Texas Instruments (TI) announced the new TMS320F2803x Piccolo microcontrollers (MCUs) featuring the Control Law Accelerator (CLA). Unique to TI’s F2803x Piccolo MCUs, the CLA is a 32-bit floating-point math accelerator that operates independently of the C28x core, allowing for direct access to on-chip peripherals and parallel execution of algorithms.

The new MCUs are based on an enhanced tightly coupled control architecture with integrated real-time control peripherals to simplify development of complex systems. Leveraging the performance and integration of the F2803x series, TI states that developers can use a single MCU to design cost-sensitive industrial, digital power and consumer applications such as LED lighting and white goods/appliances.

The F2803x MCUs are an extension to TI’s Piccolo series and are 100% code compatible across the TMS320C2000 MCU platform. With more than 30 Piccolo configurations available, developers have a broad range of performance, flash and control-oriented peripheral options to meet the varying demands of cost-sensitive, real-time control applications. TI states that developers can accelerate time to market by leveraging its complete analog portfolio, free software libraries, low cost hardware tools and technical support.

The F2802x Piccolo MCUs start at sub $2.00 in volume, and the F2803x Piccolo MCUs start at sub $3.00 in volume. The TMX320F28035 is the superset of the F2803x series and is sampling today. The F28035 controlCARD (TMDXCNCD28035) and F28035 Experimenter’s Kit (TMDXDOCK28035) are also immediately available for order entry and are priced at $59 and $89, respectively.