New TI chips to boost solar inverter performance

Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) today announced the industry's first floating point digital signal controllers (DSCs)—devices which it says should boost the performance of solar power inverters.

The new TMS320F2833x chips provide 300 million floating point instructions per second (MFLOPS) performance at 150 MHz. The performance boost allows solar power inverters to more efficiently convert energy from photovoltaic (PV) panels, the company claims.

The world's leading solar inverter manufacturers, such as SMA, Xantrex and Fronius, use TI DSCs to maximize their systems to peak efficiency through Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithms and dynamic algorithm adjustments during various load conditions, including cloudy and low light days.

TI says its new controllers have the performance headroom to maximize these MPPT algorithms and dynamic adjustments while also integrating additional system features like data logging, power line communications (PLC) or inverter synchronization to the utility grid.

Some algorithms, such as a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) used for complex calculations, will see a 200 percent improvement over an equivalent 32-bit fixed-point implementation, TI claims.

Software developers typically begin creating algorithms in a floating-point environment for validation, and then convert the code to run on fixed-point devices. Now, however, developers can eliminate the weeks—and often months—of conversion time, TI says.

The new controllers are apparently fully backward compatible with previous TI chips, and are to be available in September.

Pricing was not specified.

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