Enabling Greener Embedded Control Systems With Floating-Point DSCs

Energy efficient equipments are the need of the hour. This is especially true for large industrial motors that consume huge amounts of power, which amounts to almost two-thirds of all the electricity used by industry. These motors can be made energy efficient by using variable-speed drives instead of fixed-speed. For this, motors need to have digital control electronics, which can lead to huge saving of energy for the benefit of our environment. Variable speed motors fixed with Digital Signal Controllers (DSCs) are known to save some 68 million tons of greenhouse gases when compared to the fixed-speed motors. The DSCs, which offer the most advanced form of single-chip control processing available for high-end embedded systems, are made more efficient through floating-point architecture. The new TMS320F283x DSCs from Texas Instrument is one such controller. These DSCs with floating-point architecture enhances the performance and makes software development simple for embedded applications such as motor and motion control, automotive radar systems and renewable energy generation from sources such as solar arrays and windmills. This document gives details about the floating point architecture and also lists the various benefits that TMS320F283x DSCs offers for energy-saving control applications. The paper shows that floating-point architecture not only save processing cycles and program memory but also facilitate more computationally advanced algorithms. This helps to save energy and also add to system capabilities.