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Topic 4 Control Subsystem Slide 7

More in-depth on the VCU, takes the processing capability in terms of math to a new level. One of the important things to think about is more and more designs are moving into the communication space, this is becoming increasingly important to customers, especially in the renewable energy space. So one popular method of communications is power line communication (PLC), the customer has a network and they do not want to worry about installing a new network such as Ethernet, CAN or any of those types of implementations. The challenge is that power lines are really noisy, especially when encoding techniques are required to add extra bits to the transmitted data for error correction. Transmitting over the power line, however, this is not the difficult part, but receiving information off the line is quite math intensive with a lot of filtering, FFT, decoding and checking for data integrity. One has a very noisy line and a very small signal coming down it, so it requires a lot of complex math on top of this, the developers have to integrate PLC modem capabilities to their application device. Concerto, like its F2806 cousins, can carry out this math functionality thanks to the VCU, which can eliminate the need for an extra device in the system. Developers have seen this reduce system costs up to $2 or $3 and it also reduces the complexity from both the hardware and software standpoint. Look at the bottom of this slide, here is a block diagram of the receive portion of a PLC modem and how the VCU processes this. On the left side, one can see the complex math values or signal, are received from the analog front end, and it is first filtered by the CMU, this is a complex math unit. Then a complex FFT is processed. The CMU can run up to a four times faster 16 bit complex FFT butterfly versus a software implementation because it can do this in two cycles, the CMU can do two cycle complex number multiplication, single cycle complex number addition and two cycled complex MAC. So after the FFT, the information is decoded via the VU (Viterbi decoding unit), which can do a seven times faster butterfly and a five times faster trace back. Then, after the data is decoded, the CRC unit will perform CRC checking for its data integrity and memory, This performance increase is 25x overall because this is all done in hardware. TI is not relying on a software based system to perform these operations, it is a hardware accelerator. As mentioned in the last slide, the decision to expand the VCU with 75 new math instructions so that customers would not be bound to a fixed PLC standard, is so that it can run multiple PLC modulation schemes, protocols and support multiple compliance regulations. So in terms of PLC, the VCU really can act as a black box PLC decoder. Customers do not have to even use the VCU for PLC. This can be used for motor control in order to do vibration analysis on the motor to increase its lifespan or even applications such as radar can take the advantage of the FFT capabilities in the VCU to run the sensor algorithms. Power line communication was used as an example, but again, this is a part of the core that can be used to run these complex functions. Just as an FPU provides enhanced mathematical capabilities, the VCU is extremely efficient at performing FFTs, filters and CRC calculations.

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