In this talk, I will present a novel approach for accelerating real-time motor control applications using a MIPS defined trigonometric math custom instruction extension on RISC V. One of the most widely used algorithms in motor control is Field Oriented Control (FOC). Within the FOC loop, the Park and Inverse Park transformations require repeated sine and cosine computations, which can be a significant performance bottleneck in software-based implementations.

I will walk through a simple software implementation of the FOC loop and demonstrate the minimal code changes required to take advantage of custom trigonometric instructions. By offloading these operations to dedicated execution units integrated directly into the CPU pipeline, the solution delivers substantial performance improvements at the algorithm and system level while maintaining a software-friendly programming model.

The talk will also discuss why tightly integrated custom execution units can provide better performance, power efficiency, and area utilization compared to traditional accelerators or heterogeneous compute approaches. Using RISC V custom instructions, software developers can access application-specific hardware acceleration with minimal complexity and without rewriting core algorithms.

I will conclude by showing how accelerating motor control algorithms enables more precise, faster, lighter, and more efficient motors—benefiting applications in robotics, industrial automation, electric vehicles, and emerging real-time AI systems.