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PowerViews
October 15, 2012
PRIME Smart Metering Solution made Easy
Jesus Teijero
Director of Marketing, Smart Energy, PLC Prod, Atmel
Power Channels: Energy Efficiency, Smart Grid Power, Switch-Mode Power
The fast growing smart metering industry in the supply of power from utilities has demanded that a new solution which delivers unprecedented level of system integration, low power and high performance is required in order to ease the design cycle and keep down costs. Low Power Consumption in standby and transmission modes is vital to save operating costs and reduce the size of the meter power supply and cost efficiency in the mass production quantities of hundreds of millions of units mean price-aggressive smart meters must be made available to utilities and consumers. To facilitate this, comprehensive tools must be in place to make the task uncomplicated and the time taken by the designer to be as fast as possible.
Atmel® Corporation is a specialist company providing microcontroller and touch technology solutions and has developed the first single-chip power line communications (PLC)-based solution using an ARM® Cortex™-M4 processor-based microcontroller (MCU) targeting the rapidly growing PRIME smart metering market achieved by leveraging the company’s broad intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios. Atmel has demonstrated it is able to provide the power and electronics industry with complete solutions for the broad industrial, consumer, communications, computing and automotive markets.
The new SAM4SP32A is a compact, highly integrated solution that combines a Cortex-M4 processor-based MCU, 2MB of dual-bank Flash, 160KB SRAM and a high-performance PLC transceiver in a single-chip SoC that lowers overall system costs. The SAM4SP32A SoC is fully compliant with the latest PRIME (Power Line Intelligent Metering Evolution) PLC specification. In order to support the complex protocol required by smart meters to make firmware upgrades of the application and the protocol stack independently in the field, the new SoC integrates Atmel’s PLC technology with a high-performance Cortex-M4 MCU with 2MB of program memory on a dual-bank configuration. The new solution also leverages the powerful peripherals of the Cortex-M4 MCU, including serial peripheral interface (SPI), I2C and USARTS, to support the various communication interfaces required by smart metering applications. The new SoC offers a high level of integration and power efficiency, along with extraordinary sensitivity of up to 34.8dBuV and a dynamic range of up to -73.18dB. The new SoC includes an integrated low-power amplifier that consumes 40 percent less power than other solutions on the market today.
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