TI's new Smart Meter SoC reduces costs and improves reliability in e-meter designs

By eliminating the need for additional discrete components and redundant interfaces, the integration increases the reliability of smart e-meter designs. The new Smart Meter SoC provides developers with the ultimate level of integration, complements TI's complete portfolio for smart grid e-meter designs and now allows customers to scale their smart e-metering designs from several discrete components to the new integrated solution.

The new Smart Meter SoC is a fully integrated solution combining three independent engines. The metrology engine delivers 0.5 percent meter class accuracy and includes support for one-phase or three-phase meters. The independent, industry-standard ARM Cortex-M3 core allows ease of development for meter management firmware (DLMS/COSEM, advanced metrology, application profiles, network stack) and security with memory up to 1MB Flash. An independent, flexible communication engine includes support of multiple standards for power line communication (PLC) and radio frequency communications to allow developers to design products capable of communicating with wide area network and home area network domains and enabled devices. For more information on the Smart Meter SoC, visit www.ti.com/smartmeter-pr-lp

Features and benefits of TI's Smart Meter SoC:

-Certified metrology code is fully independent from the application code, allowing developers to make easy software upgrades and maintenance.

-Communications engine has sufficient memory for field upgrades, which reduces system costs by eliminating the need for external memory.

-Supports TI's plcSUITE™ software for all narrowband PLC standards including G1, G3, PRIME, IEEE P1901.2, ITU – G.9903 and G.9904: a single platform for global markets reduces meter development cost and speeds time to market.

-Includes multiple communication interfaces to easily connect external components like TI's RF transceivers to bridge WAN and HAN on one single chip (sub-1GHz or 2.4GHz).

-Encryption table and memory protection enable developers to include a security implementation on their smart e-meter products.

-Expandable platform to support future smart e-meter features sets because of external memory interface.

-Flexible clock scheme on separate engines allows adaption of processing power and power consumption to application requirements.

-Plugs into TI's new Smart Meter Board (SMB) 3.0 to support advanced features and near field communication (NFC), sub-1GHz, ZigBee and Wi-Fi connectivity options.

-Supports the following TI smart grid software: metrology libraries or metroSUITE compliant with EN 50470-1/3, IEC62053-21/22/23, ANSIC12.1/10/20 for one-phase and three-phase meters; plcSUITE; RF communication in sub-1GHz bands (including 802.15.4g); ZigBee Smart Energy Profile (SEP) 1.x and SEP2.0 running on the Cortex-M3 core; prepayment MIFARE, NFC and encryption for design ease and flexibility