Home > News & Analysis > TI’s free IQmath Library brings ease-of-use and precision benefits of floating point to developers leveraging C2000™ and Stellaris® microcontrollers

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TI’s free IQmath Library brings ease-of-use and precision benefits of floating point to developers leveraging C2000™ and Stellaris® microcontrollers

3rd November 2010

Texas Instruments

ES Admin

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Delivering floating-point benefits to developers using fixed-point microcontrollers (MCUs), Texas Instruments announced that its free IQmath Library now supports both the 32-bit C2000 and Stellaris MCU platforms. TI’s IQmath Library is a proven, optimized collection of high-precision mathematical functions that allows programmers to seamlessly port floating-point algorithms into fixed-point code. Developers can use the software to achieve execution speeds considerably faster than equivalent code written in standard ANSI C language, which is important to computationally intensive applications such as motor control, digital power, security and human-machine interfaces. The IQmath Library also significantly speeds development and addresses the limitations of fixed-point math by eliminating time-consuming scaling and saturation burdens.

“We have used TI’s IQmath with fixed-point C2000 MCUs in our real-time motor control applications for more than five years, and it has greatly simplified, sped and optimized our development,” said Dr. Dal Ohm, president, Drivetech, Inc. “The correct range and precision enabled by IQmath is critical in creating stable control systems for the complex power electronics that I design, and the software has also made it very easy to scale to the floating-point C2000 devices.”

IQmath Library features and benefits:

* Simplified porting from floating-point simulations/algorithms to a fixed-point MCU
* Math library for fixed-point processors speeds computation of floating-point values
* 45+ functions organized in easy-to-access categories, including format conversion utilities, arithmetic functions, trigonometric functions and mathematical functions
* Adjustable resolution and dynamic range allows optimization based on application requirements
* Seamless code portability for scaling between fixed- and floating-point MCUs
* Conversions from floating to fixed point are completed at the compile stage, so CPU cycles are not used