Software Examples to Showcase Unique Capabilities of TI’s C2000 CLA

Enabling extremely high performance computation and efficient processing is critical for solving today’s complex real-time control problems. Real-time control systems are closed-loop control systems where one has a tight time window to gather data, process that data, and update the system in order to meet the performance objectives. TI’s Control Law Accelerator (CLA) is designed to execute real-time control algorithms in parallel with the C28x CPU, effectively doubling the computational performance of C2000 devices. This application report discusses some of the unique features of CLA and demonstrates them using simple software examples. These stand-alone examples are available as part of C2000Ware and can be quickly used to explore and evaluate the capabilities of CLA.

Trademarks

C2000 is a trademark of Texas Instruments.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

1 Introduction

The CLA is a fully-programmable independent 32-bit floating-point CPU that is designed for optimal math intensive computations to offer a significant boost to the performance of control algorithms. Unlike the standard traditional processor which executes instructions and services interrupts, the CLA instead is a task-driven machine and can support up to 8 user-defined tasks. The CLA in addition to providing computational capability provides an unique combination of minimal latency and ease of access to the key control peripherals. This makes the CLA ideal for implementing fast control loops, thus freeing up bandwidth on C28x to run additional control loops and perform other diagnostic and communication related tasks. The subsequent sections of this application report discusses these unique capabilities of CLA in detail and also demonstrates them through simple software examples which are provided as part of C2000Ware package [2]. For more details on CLA architecture and instructions set, see [1], [3].

The examples discussed in this document can be found in C2000Ware v3.01.00.00 or latest, located within the following directories after installation:

C:\ti\c2000\C2000Ware_<version_number>\driverlib\f28004x\examples\cla
C:\ti\c2000\C2000Ware_<version_number>\libraries\math\CLAmath\c28\examples
C:\ti\c2000\ C2000Ware_<version_number>\libraries\control\DCL\c28\examples

The discussed example projects are:

cla_ex4_pwm_control
cla_ex5_adc_just_in_time
cla_ex6_cpu_offloading
cla_ex7_shared_resource_handling