TI's Smart Grid Solutions

The spread of intelligence is different in each industry. Smart grids have been mentioned for many years and are still slow. The reason is that the entire industry chain is too broad to be implemented overnight.

According to James Hao, marketing manager of the smart grid business unit of Texas Instruments, there are still several problems to be solved in the current application of smart grid: First, the transmission efficiency of the power grid is too low, a lot of power is lost in the transmission process, and the second is in transmission. Leakage problems in the process, such as 30% of drinking water transmission systems were leaked; Third, how to quickly locate when the grid fails; Fourth, how to balance the household power load when the grid electricity consumption peak. All these problems are solved by the participation of semiconductor technology.

According to reports, Texas Instruments has a dedicated smart grid business unit to provide a complete smart grid solutions, including smart grid infrastructure (including concentrators, power monitoring and protection, renewable energy, HV circuit breakers), smart meters (meters, Water meters, gas meters, heat meters, heat distribution meters), smart homes and buildings (Internet of things, IHD/gateways, thermostats, smart appliances, demand response units, circuit breakers, rechargeable electric vehicles).

TI's smart grid solutions are used throughout the entire network, especially in smart metering applications. The company entered this application 15 years ago and currently has 80 million products shipped. TI has a standard smart meter circuit board with metering, application processor, WiFi, RF, prepaid NFC, PLC and other modules. Customers can choose the corresponding module according to their own needs for development, and the application processor module can be based on the demand. Select Stellaris MCU, C2000 Concerto MCU, or Sitara processor. It can be said that this development version is both standard and customizable. In addition to providing standardized hardware modules, TI has also done a lot of work in software, packaging the underlying protocol stack software to customers, customers only need to pay attention to the development of related applications, which greatly shortens the development cycle .

There are some differences between smart grid applications in Europe and the United States and China. European and American countries generally integrate metering and main control units on a single chip. The Chinese government prefers to separate measurement from main control because the grid is reliable and stable. The sexual requirements are very high, and the government is also very cautious when making decisions. Worldwide, Texas Instruments offers solutions.

For the PLC modulation method used in smart grid communication, James gave a detailed introduction, TI's solution is to support both FSK (narrowband single carrier) and OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), although FSK modulation There have been very mature applications, but Texas Instruments hopes to promote the development of narrow-band OFDM, because narrow-band OFDM and FSK methods can transmit signals over a relatively wide bandwidth, speeding up the transmission speed, and the signal can also be used in terminals. Get a better recovery, and all this is within the competence of the MCU, without the need for a dedicated DSP, will not increase the cost and power consumption. However, after all, FSK is still the most used application, and the transition to OFDM will take a long time.