Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Freescale makes smart metering easier with advanced meter reference design

BARCELONA, SPAIN: Smart metering is gaining momentum as the world’s leading economies overhaul outdated power grids and build out a smart grid that will improve how power is deployed and conserved.

To help advance innovation in the energy management industry, Freescale is introducing a turnkey metering reference design built upon an advanced microcontroller (MCU) customized for the electrical metering market at the Metering Europe Conference and Exhibition, Oct. 6-8 in Barcelona.

The polyphase reference design, based on Freescale’s advanced MCF51EM256 ColdFire MCU, is a cost-optimized implementation of a single-phase or three-phase smart electrical meter. The reference design contains necessary hardware and software to make development of smart meters quick and easy.

A variety of government and corporate initiatives are underway to speed deployment of energy-saving smart metering systems for homes and industrial applications worldwide.

Freescale specifically designed the MCF51EM MCU family to help developers reduce the cost and complexity of designing electricity meters for a wide range of residential and commercial applications.

With a rich set of integrated peripherals, including a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter with a programmable delay block, an independent real-time clock with calendaring function, dual secure flash memory banks, an automated meter reading (AMR) interface and LCD driver essential for smart metering applications, the MCF51EM family provides lower overall system cost, lower power consumption, reduces maintenance costs with remote firmware updates, makes it easier to secure and protect the meter and supports a wide range of display panels for smart meters.

“Freescale recognizes that embedded control and integrated connectivity will be at the heart of future smart grids and has developed a new generation of intelligent system-on-chip controllers specifically for smart grid applications,” said Aiden Mitchell, director of Industrial and Multi-Market Microcontrollers at Freescale.

“Our goal is to provide developers with complete plug-and-play solutions designed to alleviate cost and time-to-market concerns, while bringing everyone a step closer to a unified smart grid.”

Poly-phase reference design
The polyphase reference design, based on the MCF51EM256 MCU, includes the necessary design documentation and software to help customers quickly develop a production meter design. It has been designed and tested against the following International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards:

* IEC 62053-22 International Energy Metering Specification, class 0.5 or better for active energy.
* IEC 62053-23 International Energy Metering Specification, class 2 for reactive energy.
* IEC 62056-21 International Energy Metering data exchange Specification.
* IEC 62053-22, IEC 62053-23, IEC 62052-11 Electro Static Discharge (ESD), tested per IEC 61000-4.

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